Ik Gospel ?* Work 
In Modern Life 

ROBERT WHITAKER 




Cfiss. 
Book.. 



GopyiightlS! _ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Cbe Gospel at Work 

in 

modern Eife 



Cbe Gospel at Olork 

in 

modern Life 



By 

Robert mbitaker 



Philadelphia 

the Griffith $ Rowland Press 

Boston Chicago 

St. Louis 






Copyright 1910 by 
A. J. ROWLAND, Secretary 

Published August, 1910 



LC Control Number 



)CLA*<r< 



tmp96 027053 



ftf * . * » 



PREFATORY NOTE 



The social influence of Christianity is being recog- 
nized to-day in a manner and to a degree that would 
surprise Christian workers of a generation ago. In 
keeping with this tendency, the Baptist Young 
People's Union of America has arranged its courses 
of study to provide for the needs of young people 
in the direction of this new emphasis of Christian 
thought. The purpose of this book is to serve as 
studies in the Sacred Literature Course in young 
people's societies. The subject has been chosen 
because of its practical character, and the relation 
of its parts to individual life. 

It is a matter of gratification to the Committee to 
be able to offer to young people's societies the course 
of studies in this book, at the same time so practical, 
so timely, and so deeply interesting. The author, 
who has given much of his life to a consideration 
of the questions discussed and has won for himself 
a reputation for thoroughness and candor, has 
herein given some of his best thoughts in a most 
pleasing style. 

The course has been shortened in respect to the 
number of lessons, so that it now consists of twelve 
instead of twenty or twenty-five as in former years. 
George T. Webb. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Modern Christian's Problems.. 9 

II. The Gospel That Works 20 

III. Development, a Christian's First 

Duty 31 

IV. The Gospel and Worship 42 

V. The Gospel and Home Conduct 53 

VI. The Gospel Working in the Church 64 

VII. The Gospel Working for Social Bet- 
terment 75 

VIII. The Gospel Working for Kingdom 

Expansion 86 

IX. The Gospel's Modern Miracles 96 

X. The Gospel in Business 107 

XL The Gospel and Recreations 118 

XII. The Gospel and Home Making 129 



The Gospel at Work 
in Modern Life 

CHAPTER I 

THE MODERN CHRISTIANAS PROBLEMS 

In the large library room of the Leland Stanford, 
Jr., University, at Palo Alto, Cal., at almost any 
hour of the day, several score of students may be 
found conning their lessons, making notes, or 
browsing over some book just withdrawn from the 
adjacent shelves. High above them, on the western 
wall, is a large art-glass window, whence the light 
falls upon the bowed heads of the students from 
the benignant face of a medieval saint, Thomas a. 
Kempis, the reputed author of the best-known 
book of devotional meditations which the Christian 
centuries have produced. The garb and face alike 
proclaim the monk, and the presence there of the 
great ascetic's figure is sufficient reminder to those 
at all familiar with the words of his confession, 
printed under his picture in one of the galleries of 
the Old World : " Everywhere I sought quiet, and 
found it nowhere else than in solitude and amongst 
books." 

Could the old monk himself take the place for 
an hour of that calm, illuminated face which, in 

9 



io The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

immovable complacency, looks clown upon the Stan- 
ford students of this very modern world, after what 
manner would his meditations move to-day? How 
would he write now for the young men and young 
women coming and going in the reading-room be- 
low concerning his great theme, " The imitation of 
Christ?" Or what have all the changes that have 
come to pass in the four hundred and forty years 
since he died to do with the working of the gospel 
in the lives of men? 

It may be granted that it was no dull age in 
which Thomas a Kempis lived, and that his was not 
an average life. 'He was contemporary with John 
Hus, and Jerome of Prague, and Savonarola, men 
of very different temper from his, borne through a 
far more tempestuous career. Gutenberg, to whom 
the invention of the art of printing is generally 
allowed, shared the century with a Kempis, and 
printed his first Bible about twenty years before 
a Kempis died. It was the age of the " Maid of 
Orleans " in France, of " The Wars of the Roses " 
in England, of the famous or infamous Medici 
family in Italy, and the closing years of a Kempis 
saw the fateful marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella 
in Spain. With none of these things did a Kempis 
concern himself, and they might have happened 
upon another planet so far as the great mystic had 
to do with them. But whether we think of the 
monk, a Kempis, or of the martyr, Hus, or of the 
soldier-saint, Joan of Arc, or of any other of the 



The Modern Christian's Problems II 

remembered figures of four and more centuries ago, 
as looking down from that sunset window upon the 
youth of our time, we are thinking of men and 
women almost as far away from the things that 
interest and perplex us as we seem ourselves to the 
sober minded among us from actual intercourse 
and exchange of ideas with the hypothetical in- 
habitants of Mars. 

We are not seeking quiet now, and few of us are 
seeking solitude. Our very books have become the 
clamorous voices of the unrest of our day. Our 
ideal of the saintly life has changed. We reverence 
the mystics, in art glass, but our own heart's saints 
are the men of strenuous life. We read the words 
of a Kempis somewhat as we look upon the window 
there, touched with the glory of the westering sun, 
with a certain sensitive enjoyment of its rich color- 
ing and artistic lines, feeling in a way the delicate 
hues of his words and the fine tracery of his thought. 
But we turn from it all to our tasks which are 
lighted after all by the colder light that flows in 
through unadorned windows, or perchance the 
nearer glow of the electric light. And sometimes 
the " imitation of Christ " seems itself as unreal as 
the figures wrought in art glass yonder on the 
walls, and as far removed from the conditions of 
our ordinary life as the glowing electric bulb from 
the shadowy cell of the medieval monk. 

It is fortunate for our faith that there is a greater 
distance between Jesus and a Kempis than there is 



12 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

between a Kempis and us. At first the distance 
seems to our disadvantage, for in point of time 
Jesus is farther away yet. But not in point of con- 
tact with our lives. Jesus was no ascetic. He lived 
his life emphatically among men. He was with 
them at the wedding feast, and dined familiarly 
with them at the banquet table. The plowman, the 
sower, and the harvester, the fisherman, and all the 
common round of daily toil and ordinary interests 
furnished him with the imagery of his speech. The 
common people heard him gladly because he was 
of their number and kept always his intimacy with 
their lives. He was called " a wine-bibber and a 
glutton " by reason of his easy and natural associ- 
ations with the rich, and " a friend of publicans and 
sinners " by reason of his democratic associations 
with the poor. Jesus was preeminently a " mixer " 
among men. This was more than half of his offen- 
siveness to the professionally religious of his day. 
It is increasingly his attractiveness to the men and 
women of our time who have discernment enough 
to pierce the thinner atmosphere of religious pro- 
fessionalism now. 

Yet, even Jesus is far away from the modern 
Christian's problems if we do not guard ourselves 
as to what we mean by the " imitation of Christ." 
It is not enough that we do not mean an imitation 
of a Kempis rather than Christ. It is easy enough 
to see that the issue is not for us, How shall we 
live the life of Thomas a Kempis to-day? There 



The Modern Christian's Problems 13 

may have been much to excuse it and justify it in 
the age in which a Kempis lived. But neither for 
that age nor for any other age was it the life which 
Jesus lived. It was radically different in principle. 
The ideal of a Kempis was isolation. The ideal of 
Jesus was incarnation. Thomas a Kempis did not 
imitate Jesus. He did but imitate certain moods and 
tenses of the Christian life. And there is danger 
even in the imitation of Jesus himself if we mistake 
the letter of his example for the lordship of his 
spirit and his life. Jesus' teaching is just as vital 
for us in substance as it was for the men and women 
with whom he shared the fashions and customs of a 
distant day. His was the timelessness of absolute 
truth. It is part of his timelessness that he spoke 
little of the " problems " of his own generation. But 
his life was, nevertheless, of that generation. The 
very humanness with which he lived, and the fact 
that he spoke not according to the abstractions of 
mystics or philosophers, but in the terms of every- 
day life as he actually saw it, and shared it, compel 
us to go behind the letter of his saying and doing 
if we are to translate his truth into a like union with 
the life of our day. He saved the life of his age by 
entering into it and becoming part of it. We shall 
not save the life of our generation by getting away 
from it in the effort to realize closer fellowship with 
him through an impossible union with conditions 
which have long since passed away. His ideal for 
us is neither the isolation of the medieval monk, nor 



14 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

the imitation of the forms of his own earthly min- 
istry, but the transfusion of his life into us and 
through us into the forms and customs and insti- 
tutions of our day. Thomas a Kempis would make 
candles of us all, burning in golden candlesticks of 
secluded devotion before the altars of a dead Christ. 
Jesus would make of every one of us a " live wire " 
in our own generation, electric with the divine grace 
and goodness which were in him, carrying the 
might and mystery of the heavens to the humblest 
hamlet in the land with a glow which the palaces 
of the past could not command, and drawing from 
every river and rivulet of the rushing life of our 
time the power which men of old worshiped with 
fearful faces afar off as it flashed and thundered in 
the skies, that we may minister of and through that 
power to the enlargement and enrichment of all the 
life of the world. 

Therefore, the foremost problem of the modern 
Christian is the Christian's first problem in every 
generation — to translate the timeless truth of Jesus, 
not the temporary forms of that truth, into the most 
convincing and commanding terms of contemporary 
life. And it is especially the problem of youth, be- 
cause to youth especially belongs the life of to-day. 

The problem has always been both one and many. 
It was never so manifold and complex as it is to-day. 
Life has always met youth and faith with the chal- 
lenge of change and enlargement. But the change 
was never so rapid and so varied, and the enlarge- 



The Modem Christian's Problems 15 

ment never so trying to judgment and courage as 
is the case in this century in which we live. Often 
and again there has been need of intellectual re- 
adjustment to meet the conditions of expanding 
knowledge. It was even before the beginnings of 
Christianity that one wrote the familiar complaint, 
" Of making many books there is no end, and much 
study is a weariness of the flesh." Yet, for every 
student the world knew then, it knows a thousand 
now, and we burn up more printed matter every 
morning in starting our fires than all the laborious 
copyists of that ancient day could write down from 
year's end to year's end. If the discoveries of a 
Galileo seemed to the men of the medieval world 
to threaten the very foundations of the faith, what 
of the vastly more disturbing upheavals which have 
broken the crust of every province of education in 
our time, and tumbled down great cities of pains- 
takingly builded traditions wherein men have lived 
and wrought for centuries? If the world of 
thought was stirred to restlessness when the pio- 
neers of research went forth a day's journey with 
their ox-cart conveyances into the unexplored 
regions beyond their Alleghanies what of convic- 
tion and conjecture now when men pass from sea to 
sea within a week and investigation goes with the 
swiftness and force of a modern express train, or 
challenges the lightness and celerity of the birds in 
their own atmosphere? Never was the problem 
so acute as it is to-day for those who would keep 



1 6 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

their faith and would keep also abreast of knowl- 
edge. Never was it so easy to throw old truth 
away by reason of the pressure of new opinion. 
Never did the fellowship with Jesus require such 
nice discrimination as it does now on the intellectual 
side between the changing terms in which we think 
of all externals from documents to doctrines and 
the essential changelessness of all that pertains to 
the inner life of truth. Yet, nowhere is the gospel 
more triumphantly at work in modern life than in 
demonstrating the difference between faith and in- 
tellectual form. 

Nor was ever the problem of poverty or plenty so 
pressing as it is to-day. There is more in this 
modern world to tempt the young Christian, espe- 
cially, to forsake the " mind of Christ " for mam- 
monism than even the ages of buccaneering knew. 
For our necessities are more than the luxuries of 
our fathers, and their affluence is less than compe- 
tence for us. Not only are the manifest rewards im- 
measurably greater for the successful now, but 
the area of success has enlarged quite as much as 
the area of education, and the common man has 
access to the adventures of wealth beyond even the 
degree of his access to the once exclusive fields of 
knowledge. Mammonism is not only more demo- 
cratic than it was of old, hobnobbing now with all 
classes and conditions of men, and holding out an 
inviting hand to the street urchin as well as to the 
prince, but mammonism is more respectable and 



The Modern Christian's Problems ij 

much more religious. Nowhere is the problem of 
adjustment between a faithful following of the 
Christ and participation in the life of this present 
world more difficult to-day than it is with respect 
to the Christian's attitude toward wealth. We have 
taken the rich young ruler into the church, and are 
holding him up as an example of achievement and 
rare opportunity. Yet the gospel was never more 
mightily at work for the overthrow of mammonism 
than it is in the hearts of multitudes of Christians 
to-day. 

The problem of pleasure, like the problem of 
profit, is vastly increased and intensified. The field 
of knowledge has not more enlarged than the field 
of what is popularly called fun. There is no 
more serious obstacle to the growth of the king- 
dom of God among us than the levity of the age. 
Religion has profited by the growth of cheerfulness. 
But counterfeit cheerfulness is more costly to a 
people than counterfeit currency. A vast amount 
of our humor is not humor at all, but vicious vul- 
garity, as witness our Sunday supplements. Recre- 
ation is the next neighbor to regeneration, as the 
very form of the word implies, but to confound it 
with dissipation is as dangerous as to mistake a 
reef for the entrance to a harbor. One of the 
largest problems of the Christian life of the day, 
and preeminently of the young Christian life of 
this generation, is the redemption of the vast new 
provinces which have been added within recent 



18 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

times to the once comparatively meager and barren 
domain of diversion and delight. 

And how is the whole field of conscience ex- 
panded to-day ! What problems the growth of 
modern industrialism presents to the man who 
would determine his ways by the spirit of Christ. 
How easy is it to be individually honest, and kind, 
and even generous, and to be socially void of 
Christian conscience and as fractionally irrespon- 
sible as was the savage in his primitive individual 
way. What bigger problem has any age had than 
this of developing a co-operative Christian con- 
science? And let it not be thought that this prob- 
lem concerns the employer more than it does the 
employee, the man who sells his brains for big div- 
idends more than the man who sells his body for a 
" full dinner pail." This is peculiarly the problem 
of our time. The effective working of the gospel 
in almost any of us to-day is conditioned to a 
degree the world has never known before upon the 
development of a social conscience that shall be 
purely and profoundly Christian. 

These are the larger lines of the problem of in- 
terpreting the gospel in the terms of our times. In 
one sense all these problems are old; they were al- 
ways part of the main problem. Yet are they each 
of them as different from what they were yesterday 
as Europe is different from the Europe of Thomas 
a Kempis' day. And all our problems, however old 
in substance, are so new in emphasis that they are 



The Modem Christian's Problems 19 

practically new worlds to conquer for the Christ. 
If his gospel is to win them through us, we must 
be very sure that we know what his gospel is. 

+ +* 
Quiz 

i. Who was Thomas a Kempis? 2. In what re- 
spect does the monastic attitude toward life differ 
from the method of Jesus' ministry? 3. What is 
the fundamental problem of every generation with 
reference to Christian living? 4. How does the en- 
larging field of knowledge and research affect 
Christian living to-day? 5. What are the forces 
which make most for mammonism now? 6. How 
is the problem of pleasure affected by modern de- 
velopments? 7. What do you understand by a 
social conscience? 

Topics for Further Study 

I. What are the dangers of pietism? 2. Is the 
cheerfulness of present-day Christian living as 
compared with the somberness of the past wholly 
an advantage? 3. If you perceive points of danger 
and disadvantage in the present attitude, indicate 
what they are. 4. Do you consider the present age 
as on the whole more favorable to Christian living 
than the past? 5. If so, state what its advantages 
are. 



CHAPTER II 

THE GOSPEL THAT WORKS 

In a quiet Christian home, not long ago, I found 
this bit of verse from a well-known woman writer 
of to-day : 

" So many gods, so many creeds, 
So many paths that wind and wind, 
When just the art of being kind 
Is all the sad world needs." 

The " sad world " was no idle phrase with that 
family just then, for under the modestly framed 
motto was an open coffin, and in the coffin lay the 
youngest daughter of the house, one of the fairest 
girls of thirteen brief summers I have ever seen. 
There was certainly need of the gospel of kindness 
in that house that day. And there was need of 
more. 

There is need of the gospel of kindness in every 
home and every age. The " art of being kind " is 
not so common that we can afford to despise any 
wise emphasis upon it. Nor is it so small a part 
of the gospel of Jesus Christ as some suppose. 
Love may be the larger word, but there is some- 



The Gospel that Works 21 

thing of the warmth and glow of the open fireside 
about that word kindness, and it does one's heart 
good to sit before it and take in the brightness and 
comfort of it. 

But the word kindness will have to be exceed- 
ingly enlarged beyond all its ordinary meanings if 
we are going to make it cover all the height and 
depth and length and breadth of religion. This is 
putting a strain upon the word which our differ- 
ences concerning " gods " and " creeds " will hardly 
justify. Nor would these differences disappear if 
we called our " gods " and " creeds " by some other 
name, whether that name were kindness or some 
more pretentious word. 

Our age will not be satisfied with sectarianism 
for religion, but neither will it be satisfied with 
sentiment. There is nothing in " gods " and 
" creeds " except as our idea of " being's source and 
end" is an inspiration to godly, that is godlike, 
living. In the last analysis the value of a man's 
" god " is the " good " which follows. So also the 
value of a man's creed, that is of his belief, is its 
product in character. What he lives is his actual 
faith. But it is foolish to suppose that kindness 
cannot be counterfeited quite as easily as any other 
god or creed when kindness is substituted for these, 
and there is no reason whatever for the notion that 
men would all think alike as to kindness if that 
were suddenly made the universal religious formula. 
There would be as many kinds of kindness in that 



22 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

case as there are kinds of " gods " and " creeds " 
now. 

The popular disparagement of " gods " and 
" creeds " which finds expression everywhere to- 
day is chiefly due to the fact that our contentions 
about these things so often obscure the real thing, 
and that is that the end of all religion is moral and 
not metaphysical, spiritual and not intellectual, a 
present salvation from " the sin that doth so easily 
beset us " and not a hypothetical " beatification " 
in some " blessed land " beyond the grave. It is 
better to be kind here and now, if the kindness is 
real and not merely superficial, than it is to hide 
harshness and selfishness under the borrowed 
plumage of empty talk about God, even though our 
kindness lack something of conscious inspiration 
through faith in him who is nevertheless the source 
of all the goodness and kindness that is in the 
world. It is better to be negative as to one's be- 
liefs, to confess a kind of a vague agnosticism as to 
the beginning and end of things if one can still be 
positive on the side of righteousness and truth- 
fulness and kindness between man and man than to 
have " the plan of the ages " at one's tongue's end, 
and at the same time be narrow and intolerant and 
void of any effective social consciousness. " God is 
not mocked," and as between the man who worships 
a shibboleth in the name of God and the man who 
serves righteousness and misses the definition of 
the divine, there is no reason to think that he will 



The Gospel that Works 23 

prefer the label on an empty package to the goods 
themselves, though the label has been obscured. 
The " foundation of God " which " nevertheless 
standeth sure " is very significantly defined in the 
ancient Scripture in two great affirmations, " the 
Lord knoweth them that are his," and " let every 
one that nameth the name of the Lord depart from 
unrighteousness." Only as our dogmatic and 
creedal packages are the guarantee of genuineness 
and uncontamination will they count for anything 
with God. 

All this is granted with the heartiest welcome to 
any thoughtful and earnest protest against mere 
creedalism as a substitute for helpful, faithful, 
kindly living. By all means let us beware of 
" gods " and " creeds " which tend to get between 
us and godly character. The demand for life as 
against mere lip service is good. The insistence 
upon kindness as much nearer the heart of religion 
than contention over definitions is sensible and 
sound. " Sound doctrine " means first of all sound 
living, and when it means less the clamor for it is 
a false cry. The world's need to-day, the panacea 
for present problems, is not the success of this or 
that dogma in itself considered, nor the triumph of 
any mere definition of the gospel; the world's need 
is the gospel itself, and nothing less than this will 
work salvation for the men and women of our time. 
And whatever else the gospel may include or im- 
ply, the gospel itself is first and last and always a 



24 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

life, of which kindness is no inconsiderable part. 
Jesus came '■ that men might have life," not logic, 
and that " they might have it more abundantly," 
not that they might increase their creeds, of which 
the world had already a plenty even then. Certainly 
he did not die to save a definition; he died as he 
lived, to save men. Neither is there any definition 
by which men are always and everywhere saved. 
Men are saved as they live in him, and in no other 
way. The value of a man's creed is simply as a 
viaduct through which the water of life finds its 
way to his inmost life. It is the water that saves, 
not the waterway. Yet, how shall a man drink 
without a " cup," even the " blood " ; that is, the life 
of Christ? Why find fault that some waterways 
are of wood, and some of clay, and some of lead or 
iron or stone, unless they are so clogged that the 
water cannot flow through them at all, or unless they 
dangerously contaminate the water itself? Grant 
that the water is the all in all, and that here and 
there men are found strong enough to go back to 
its hidden sources in the hills and drink from their 
own hands. Still is it not true that for the vast ma- 
jority of those who " labor and are heavy laden " 
the water must be carried to their lips in cups and 
vessels which other men have made and filled, and 
by waterways which are not always perfect in serv- 
ice? Even the poorest of this service is generally 
better than no service at all. And, unfortunately, 
if I may carry the figure a little farther, the tend- 



The Gospel that Works 25 

ency in modern life is to favor less of private mon- 
opoly in these waterways which serve the multitude, 
and to make the service both cheaper and better ; in 
a word, to give every man more of immediate con- 
trol over his own supplies. 

The fact is that what we need is not fewer 
" gods " and " creeds." What we need is more. 
We need that every man shall have his own thought 
about God, and that every man shall have his own 
individual faith toward the divine. There would be 
more of goodness and kindness if there were more 
thoughtfulness about religious things. The gospel 
will work best as it works most individually, as 
every man insists upon it for himself that he has a 
pure and a plenteous supply. We may not all pre- 
fer the same kind of a cup, and we may not all be 
supplied through the same particular pipe next to 
our own door. But we are all getting to the point 
where we feel the common need of getting the 
water as nearly as possible as it falls out of the same 
generous skies or springs in purity from the depths 
of the ground. And for our religion we are all 
getting back more and more to the mountain 
heights of the Scriptures and the skies under which 
we stand face to face with God. 

Let the young Christian beware both of overmuch 
dependence upon creeds and of overmuch dispar- 
agement of creeds. He can neither get along with 
them nor without them of themselves. Their value 
for him is their mediation of life to him. If the 



26 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

divine life flows free and strong through them, 
they are of value to him, otherwise they are worse 
than vain. But let him not suppose that he can sub- 
stitute for them some vague sentiment which has 
no sense of God and no imperative of divine origin 
and destiny within it. This will prove but a mir- 
age in the desert. No gospel will work very long 
or very far in our own age or any other which is 
not first of all a gospel of God. " Well, what do 
you believe in ? " I asked an irate infidel, who 
gloried in the name, and who was raging against 
the idea of God. And he thundered at me with tre- 
mendous inconsistency, " What do I believe in ? I 
believe in love ! " Yet, long centuries ago, one 
said to have been that disciple who leaned on Jesus' 
bosom, and who learned from the Master himself the 
immortal and incomparable definition, gave this as 
the synonym of God, " God is love/' So that either 
the infidel was himself a hypocrite, or else he was not 
an infidel, since his faith was in God. A man may 
look up, and in fellowship with Jesus say, " Abba," 
that is, " Father," or he may talk learnedly of his 
confidence in " the integrity of the cosmic proc- 
ess," but if he thinks truly at all, he will hardly 
get away from the idea of God. No other gospel 
works life in men. It is no accident that the 
record is made concerning Moses, whose kindness 
to Israel was no mere personal sentiment, but an 
all-consuming social passion, " He endured as see- 
ing him who is invisible." No kindness bigger than 



The Gospel that Works 27 

a bit of simple good nature or passing sentiment 
will long " endure " without spiritual vision. The 
gospel that works is the gospel of God. 

And it is the gospel of God in a person, in " the 
man Christ Jesus." " You think that you do not be- 
lieve in the divinity of Jesus Christ," I said in sub- 
stance to a friend of ultra-Unitarian views, but of 
very beautiful and Christlike life. " Are you sure 
of it? Is not the God and Father in whom you 
believe really Jesus Christ, whom you have given 
another name? Are not all your thoughts of the 
divine actually in terms of Jesus Christ? Neither 
you nor any one else can be saved from false think- 
ing and false living, except as you do really think 
and live in him, whether you recognize him as the 
source of your living and thinking or not." He 
could not deny the affirmation, though he was slow 
to allow what it implied to me. 

The gospel that works is always and everywhere 
the gospel of Jesus Christ. It always was. Even 
before Jesus was revealed? Certainly so. This is 
the meaning of that word, " Before Abraham was I 
am"; and that other word said to those who felt 
themselves at a disadvantage because the generation 
of those who had seen and known the Lord in the 
flesh was rapidly failing from among men, " Jesus 
Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for- 
ever." The only gospel that ever saved anybody 
was the gospel of Jesus Christ. " That was the 
true light which lighteth every man that cometh 



28 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

into the world." Something of the light which 
shone in all perfectness in him has filtered through 
to all men, and they have been saved from present 
sinning and for the future mercy of God just in 
the measure that they have believed and lived the 
doctrine which he made incarnate, the word which 
he " made flesh." There is truth in the old doc- 
trine of " total depravity " to this extent at least 
that every man is wholly bad except as he catches 
here and there something of the spirit of Jesus and 
is touched with something of his life. Men are only 
saved even here and now as they are saved in him, 
by getting for the moment or for this or that phase 
of character into oneness with him. 

It is true enough that religion is not fundamen- 
tally and finally a matter of " gods " and " creeds." 
Neither is it a matter of " the art of being kind " 
alone. It is a matter of getting into touch with 
God through essential union with Jesus Christ in 
the life which he lived among men. A man's defi- 
nition of God may be faulty and his creed at many 
points quite incredible to any intelligent mind, and 
yet he may have much of the spirit of Christ, and the 
gospel of Christ may be working in him mightily 
for the salvation of the world. But whatever of 
good there is in him, and whatever of good he is 
actually doing in the world, is of Christ; not of 
his beliefs about Christ, which may be very much 
awry, but of his substantial agreement with Christ 
in spirit and in word and deed. There is a vast 



The Gospel that Works 29 

amount of believing about Jesus, and some of it 
quite correct believing, which does not work. 
Whatever does work and stand the test of time, 
needs only to be truly known to be proven as be- 
longing to the revelation of Christ. Nothing will 
work that is not fundamentally of him. Nothing 
that is actually of him will ultimately fail to work. 
What the age needs is Christ. Not the name only, 
nor this or that creed about him. None of our 
creeds about him have any importance worth while 
except as they mediate his life to us and to the 
world. When we make them final we make them 
mischievous, sometimes more mischievous than no 
creed at all. Creeds only work good as they work 
Christ into human lives. He who has Christ will 
need no other master to teach him kindness. But 
Christ will teach him vastly more. He will teach 
him love in all its largeness, and with this love, faith 
toward God and toward man, without which love 
is as sad as Buddhism; and with this faith, hope, 
both for the future of this present world and for 
his own and humanity's hereafter. Nothing that 
the world needs is out of Christ, and nothing of 
good that the world has. If there is any superior 
efficiency in the gospel of our day, and I think there 
is, it is the superior efficiency of a gospel which is 
more perfectly than the faith of yesterday the gos- 
pel which Jesus lived and taught. If there is any 
deficiency, and there is much beyond question, it 
is deficiency in understanding or applying the truth 



30 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

as it is in him. Whether for yourself or for the 
world, if you would find the gospel that works you 
must find him. 

Quiz 

I. In what sense can we properly speak of 
" gods " to-day? 2. What is the end and object of 
religion as here set forth? 3. What value have 
creeds? 4. What is believing in God? 5. What do 
you understand by thinking of God " in terms of 
Jesus Christ " ? 6. Can a man believe in Christ and 
not believe properly about him? 7. What is the 
gospel that works ? 

Topics for Further Study 

I. What is kindness? 2. What are the indica- 
tions in modern life that men are moving toward 
democracy in religion and away from monopoly? 
3. What varieties of practical polytheism have we 
still with us to-day? 4. In what sense could men 
be actually saved through Christ before Christ 
came? 5. In what sense is Christ the working gospel 
of all ages ? 6. What do you understand by finding 
Christ for yourself? 



CHAPTER III 

DEVELOPMENT, A CHRISTIANAS FIRST DUTY 

It is said of the great Russian thinker and writer, 
Count LyofT Tolstoy, now past eighty years of age, 
that he recently confessed a consciousness of three 
periods in his life. During the first period, which 
is far away from him now in point of time and 
much farther in any interest or regard he has 
toward it, he lived for himself and for the pleas- 
ures of the flesh. The second period, which was the 
period of his conversion and his first religious 
writings, and also largely of his philanthropic ef- 
forts, he was chiefly anxious to do good, and to dis- 
seminate his ideas for the benefit of mankind. Dur- 
ing the third period even his anxiety to do good 
has largely ceased, and his interest is in being good ; 
or as he would put it, he is content to seek for him- 
self fellowship with God and that perfection of 
character which he realizes now as the highest end 
and aim of life. 

Thomas Carlyle, the great Scotch philosopher, 
who in his own way was perhaps as profoundly re- 
ligious as Tolstoy himself, made a somewhat similar 
confession in his old age. Speaking of Darwin and 
Darwinism, he once said : " The older I grow, and 

3i 



32 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

now I stand upon the brink of eternity, the more 
there comes back to me the words which I learned 
from the old church catechism when a child : ' What 
is the chief aim and end of man ? ' and the answer : 
' To glorify God, and enjoy him forever.' No 
gospel of dirt, teaching that men are descended 
from frogs through monkeys, can ever set that 
aside." 

Carlyle's fling at evolution, which was a con- 
siderably different matter then from what it is 
now, we can afford to pass by, for it does not con- 
cern us 'here. But the testimony of these two 
mighty minds to the primary importance of 
spiritual growth and culture as the end of supreme 
significance in itself is testimony not to be lightly 
ignored. Whatever allowance we may make for 
the lessening interest of men in what are called 
practical affairs as earth recedes and the other 
world draws nearer, these men cannot be accused 
of ever having lost their sense of fellowship with 
humanity or their intense and self-sacrificing spirit 
toward the betterment of this present world. It 
might be said of them in a sense, as it was said of 
Jesus, " Having loved his own, he loved them unto 
the end." Carlyle, and Tolstoy at eighty belong to 
the world, and have no less hearty interest in it 
than fifty years before. But they understand better 
what life's first great concern really is. 

The best gift that any man can give to the world 
is himself. And a man never gives himself to the 



Development, a Christian's First Duty 33 

world until he has first of all given himself to God. 
This is no formal religious phrase; it is supreme 
spiritual fact. That old story in Genesis is capable 
of many a concealed meaning. It is not good for 
man " to be " alone. Doing is as necessary to be- 
ing as the woman is to the man. " And what God 
hath joined together let not man put asunder." 
But being is first. And not until being is formed 
at the hand of God, and gets its life from the very 
breath of God, can doing proceed by the same di- 
vine will out of its side. And then they two are 
indeed one flesh. 

Christian living to-day cannot be separated from 
the life of to-day. If we are to follow Jesus' 
method of mingling with men, and interpenetrating 
the human with the divine, we must be men and 
women of our time, in touch with its expanding 
knowledge, participating in its enlarging material de- 
velopment, responsive to its humor and happiness, 
and co-operating in its co-operative spirit. We must 
be able to distinguish the gospel from the incidents 
and accidents of present-day religious expression in 
gospel lands, and must know how to apply the sub- 
stance of hope and faith and love so that the very 
essence of the Christian revelation shall be applied to 
the everyday aspects of life as it actually is in the 
world around us to-day. But to understand our 
times is even less important than to understand our- 
selves, and the good we give will be limited always 
and everywhere by the good we get. 
c 



34 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

Moral philosophers have discussed a great deal 
the question, What is the sumimiim bonum, " the 
greatest good " ? Much may be said for happiness as 
the end toward which all things move. But per- 
fection of character, which includes happiness as a 
consequent, is on the whole the more satisfactory 
definition of life's aim and end. " Be ye therefore 
perfect," said Jesus, " even as your Father in heaven 
is perfect." He did not say, " Be ye therefore 
happy," though he indicated in his beatitudes that 
blessedness, or happiness, is the resultant of right 
character. The words that we run off so often in 
glib fashion, " Be good and you'll be happy," have 
a large measure of substantial sense in them. 
Yet the more modern version of the saying, half 
facetiously said, " Be good and you'll be lone- 
some," voices a great deal of very serious experi- 
ence. One of our common Christian hymns has 
for its chorus in part, " And now I am happy all 
the day." But the words are not true of most of 
us, and they are not true of the best of us in the 
light fashion in which we run them off our tongues. 
Jesus was " a man of sorrows, and acquainted with 
grief," notwithstanding the " joy " and " peace " 
which were his priceless bequest to the world. And 
every man who follows him will know something 
of " the fellowship of his suffering " before he 
tastes of " the power of his resurrection." Not 
mirth, but manhood; not pleasure, but personality; 
not happiness, but wholeness the Christian must 



Development, a Christian's First Duty 35 

make the greatest good of his effort and his 
thought. 

There is danger in any lower ideal. Happiness 
so easily becomes mere luxuriousness, or some form 
of mischievous self-indulgence. Hedonism, the 
philosophy of pleasure, may, indeed, become highly 
moral if carefully reasoned out and held under the 
dominion of serious thought; but the whole tend- 
ency of it is to degenerate easily into this or that 
form of sensuous delight. Even a great deal of 
what passes for Christian happiness is very far re- 
moved from that blessedness which Jesus set forth 
as the fruit of the humble, gentle, pure, and peace- 
able mind. Much of it is the contagious enthusiasm 
of an emotional crowd, wherein half the charm and 
a large part of the danger of our great meetings 
will be found. Much of it is the half-unconscious 
gratification of personal ambitions, and the deep 
desire for prominence which more or less actuates 
us all. Sometimes it is a kind of self-induced hyp- 
notic state wherein we abide in dangerous self- 
complacency because we have lost the sense of our 
relations to the actual life around us for a time. 
A great deal of so-called " holiness " is of this last- 
named type, and does not really consist in whole- 
someness of character so much as it does in a de- 
fective consciousness of self and the living world 
about us. There are as many forms of deceitful 
happiness as there are kinds of intoxicating drink, 
and there is more pertinence than appears to many 



36 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

of us in the old-fashioned warning of the Scrip- 
tures, " And be not drunk with wine wherein is 
excess ; but be filled with the Spirit." All forms of 
happiness tend to excess, even what is sometimes 
called spiritual happiness. The spirit of wholeness, 
of perfectness, is our only safe guide. 

There is need of caution, even with reference to 
perfection as an ideal, lest we think of self-develop- 
ment too much from the standpoint of self alone, 
and with regard to an ideal which is not the ideal 
of the gospel. All that has been said about the 
modern Christian's problems, and all that has been 
said concerning the substance of the gospel that 
works, needs to be kept in mind if we are to seek 
such development as will make us both Christian 
and Christian in relation to the age in which we 
live. 

A witty young minister, who was attending a 
banquet of Christian workers, and had his newly 
wedded bride with him, got off this clever witticism 
at her expense : " Some women," he said, " marry 
shoemakers that they may be shod for nothing; 
some women marry doctors that they may be doc- 
tored for nothing." Then, looking fondly and 
roguishly at his wife, he added slowly, " And some 
women marry ministers — that they may be good 
for nothing." 

Neither women nor men are good unless they are 
good for something. A great deal of perfectionism 
is altogether in the air; it amounts to nothing in 



Development, a Christian's First Duty 37 

practical Christian living. It is not really self- 
development so much as it is self-excitation and 
self-illusionment. The man does not actually know 
any more than he knew before. Most perfectionists 
are wholly out of sympathy and understanding of 
modern knowledge. The man is not a better work- 
man, nor a better master. The Eighth Psalm is a 
wonderful picture of man as the viceroy of God 
upon earth, entering into his lordship over nature 
as he enters more and more into his sonship with 
God. But a great deal of what is mistaken for 
Christian culture is wholly apart from man's 
sovereignty over the world around him; it has 
nothing to do with the world's work. Especially is 
a great deal of what is reckoned effort toward 
Christian perfection morbid and melancholy and 
wholly out of touch with wholesome laughter and 
life's good cheer. This is not perfection, for there 
can be no perfection of any part which does not 
adapt it for its place in the whole. No piece of a 
watch is perfect unless it will work with the rest. 
Perfection means participation, not abstraction. To 
develop one feature of a man's face out of all har- 
monious relation to his other features is to make a 
caricature of the man. And a good deal of " re- 
ligiousness " is a caricature of righteousness, not 
the less so that it is sincere and serious enough. 

Herein is the mischief of mysticism of every type. 
It lacks where Jesus was complete — in his identifica- 
tion of himself with life. " Jesus grew in wisdom 



38 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

and in stature, and in favor with God and man." 
But he grew within his environment, and he grew 
into all the life of his time. He did not grow apart 
from men, but he grew among men. Doubtless he 
studied in such schools as Nazareth had. There is 
an easily believable tradition that he worked at the 
carpenter's bench with his father. He wore no 
such exceptional clothes as John the Baptist wore, 
nor did he live upon a peculiar diet, or assume in 
anywise peculiar ways. This is Christian develop- 
ment, in harmonious adjustment with actual every- 
day life. It is not being good, either " for noth- 
ing," or in some far-off abstract, emotional way. 
It is emphatically " being good for something." Yet 
it is more than mere activity. Jesus was no insti- 
tutionalise He was as far from identifying char- 
acter with outward circumstance and conditions as 
he was from divorcing the two. Development with 
him was never separate from life, but neither was 
it identical with any outward show. He was both 
the practical man of affairs and the idealist, both of 
his own century emphatically, and of eternity. His 
perfection was both timely and timeless. 

One gets this development only by holding fast to 
these two things : the " time-spirit " of his own age, 
and the timelessness of the essential gospel. To 
know the age in which we live, to feel its problems 
and enter sympathetically into their solution, to 
have what may be called a contemporary conscious- 
ness; and then to know the heart of the gospel, to 



Development, a Christians First Duty 39 

get beneath its own time-forms to its everlasting 
and never-changing spirit, and to bring these two 
together in one's self so that the seed of the time- 
less truth shall grow in the newly turned soil of 
the present and shall have every advantage of the 
latest instruments and methods of cultivation, this 
is what Christian development means when rightly 
understood. 

" After that he had served his own generation ac- 
cording to the will of God he fell on sleep," is the 
great epitaph of Israel's great shepherd-king. And 
that is still the Christian ideal, to live " according 
to the will of God " and in that will to serve one's 
" own generation." Only the gospel of Christ has 
given us a clearer manifestation of God, and of 
what it is to live " according to his will." And it 
has given us also a " generation " of our own whose 
conditions are very different from those which con- 
fronted the son of Jesse and the successor of Saul. 
But David was more Christian than many Chris- 
tians are, because he combined communion with the 
divine and the companionship of men in all that 
made for the larger life of his times in a measure 
altogether too uncommon in the world yet. 

This is the Christian's first business, perfection. 
Not abstraction from the wickedness of the world, 
nor activity in the religiousness of the world, but 
the development of himself in faith, and hope, and 
love. In this development he will find retirement 
sometimes necessary to enlargement of life. In this 



40 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

development he will find religious activity often 
helpful to him. But he will choose them not as 
ends in themselves, but as means to the one great 
end, the realization of the divine life in himself. 
And he will study to perfect himself not in some 
peculiar type of ecstatic experience, but in the serv- 
ice of men through being himself among men, and 
in relation to like experiences with their own the 
embodiment of the truth which alone can make men 
free. 

To honor God, to benefit mankind, 
To serve with lowly gifts the lowly needs 
Of the poor race for which the God- 
man died, 
And do it all for love ! Oh, this is great, 
And he who does this will achieve a name 
Not only great, but good. 

— /. G. Holland. 

+ * + 
Quiz 

I. What is the chief aim and end of man as sug- 
gested by Tolstoy and Carlyle, and other like philos- 
ophers ? 2. What do you understand by perfection, 
and what is the chief defect of most so-called " per- 
fectionism"? 3. What is "Hedonism"? 4. Can a 
Christian reasonably expect to be always happy? 5. 
If not, why not? 6. What is the mischief of mys- 
ticism? 7, What do you understand by the "time- 



Development, a Christian's First Duty 41 

spirit " and the " timelessness of the essential 
gospel " as applied to practical Christian living ? 

Topics for Further Study 

1. Are the present aspects of the doctrine of evo- 
lution more or less favorable to the religious life 
than the earlier definitions of it? 2. Do you dis- 
cover any likeness between the monastic attitude 
toward the Christian life and modern " holiness " ? 
3. What may be said for the great mystics and for 
mysticism in general? 4. Is religious activity ever 
a menace to the religious life? 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GOSPEL AND WORSHIP 

On the face of the returns, the enlargement of 
modern life has not made for worship. There is an 
old and often quoted sentiment, given on the au- 
thority of more than one great name, that " igno- 
rance is the mother of devotion." However this 
may be, the remarkable increase of knowledge in our 
times, and the apparent decline of public worship, 
seem sometimes to justify the proverb. There are a 
great many people who unfortunately have been 
educated away from the churches, and many of the 
keenest minds of the day confess both in speech 
and conduct their indifference to all the forms of 
religious devotion. 

The growth of wealth has also made against 
worship. Mammonism has never been on the side 
of spiritual sensibility, and spiritual sensibility is at 
the root of worship. Here and there a millionaire 
may be sincerely religious, and a great many people 
of moderate fortune, especially if that fortune is 
inherited, are undoubtedly so. But the multitude of 
those who are possessed with the money mania are 
not genuinely interested in prayer and praise and 
the quest after the values that are unseen. All 
42 



The Gospel and Worship 43 

who give themselves passionately to the pursuit of 
wealth are thereby drawn away from following after 
Christ, according to the discipleship which he him- 
self required when he walked among men. The in- 
creasing clamor of the market-place does not make 
for growth in the spirit of meditation, and the larger 
material prizes which our age offers to the man who 
succeeds after the world's methods and the world's 
measures do not serve as an inducement to worship 
God alone. 

The intenser pleasure life of our period is also 
unfavorable to worship. The bicycle, the auto- 
mobile, the Sunday excursion, the Sunday theater 
and nickelodeon, and all the multiplied devices for 
attracting the people away from Sunday rest and 
the house of God on the one day in seven when 
they are otherwise unemployed, have tremendously 
increased the temptation to forget God and live in 
the sensations of the present hour. This pleasure 
life of the many in its more unhealthful phases is 
stimulated by the money mania of those who cater 
to them. The street railway manager may himself 
be the devout and orthodox Sunday-school teacher 
in an evangelical Sunday-school, yet the railway of 
which he has charge may be one of the most mis- 
chievous promoters of Sabbath desecration and all- 
around Sunday dissipation which the city or State 
can show. The big breweries have not more un- 
conscionably contributed to the extension of the re- 
tail liquor shop and the stimulation by every evil 



44 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

device of the demoralizing appetite for strong drink 
to the end that they might increase their own divi- 
dends at whatever cost to the public welfare than 
have the venders of transportation and the pro- 
moters of amusements forced forth their dividends 
with unrighteous disregard for those great interests 
of society which are bound up in a right use of the 
weekly rest day, and in the preservation of the 
spirit of worship. 

The forces that work against worship as to the 
observance of its outward forms, at least, are not 
wholly evil in themselves. Quite aside from that 
type of knowledge which leads men away from the 
church and the religious life, and far removed from 
the materialistic mammonism and thoughtless pleas- 
ure-seeking which work the same result in even 
more destructive ways, there are other forces at 
work which are good in themselves, and in the main, 
wholesome in their influence which are, nevertheless, 
not on the side of crowded churches, the swelling 
anthem, and the voice of public prayer. 

The increase of real religion sometimes makes 
for an apparent decline of worship. Men who think 
of churchgoing as the sum and substance of 
religious obligation, are frequently more attentive to 
it than are those who appreciate more truly what 
religion is. The comparison often lightly made be- 
tween Roman Catholics and Protestants in the 
matter of faithful and self-sacrificing attendance 
upon public worship, is generally faulty at this point. 



The Gospel and Worship 45 

The average Roman Catholic thinks of religion 
much more in terms of ritual and formal devotion 
than does the average Protestant. Worship with 
the one is the first fact in religion ; with the other the 
first fact is spiritual attitude. The church is religion 
to the one; it is only an expression of religion 
to the other. Therefore, as men grow in appreci- 
ation of what the gospel is in fact, they are, super- 
ficially, at least, more indifferent to this or that 
particular form. The woman with whom Jesus 
talked at the well of Samaria was apparently more 
concerned than was Jesus himself in regard to the 
proprieties of public worship. " Our fathers wor- 
shipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jeru- 
salem is the place where men ought to worship," is 
her plaint. Jesus sets all the externals of religion 
aside for the moment that he may emphasize the 
spiritual character of any real approach to God. If 
the church is conceived of as some divinely ap- 
pointed place of worship, and worship itself as a 
certain set manner of approach to God, then did 
Jesus make less of worship than the Samaritan wo- 
man. But he made a great deal more of the inner 
life of worship than she had ever known. 

The gospel that works does not always work most 
for a life of devotional form. Perfection of char- 
acter as an ideal tends to emphasize the doing of 
what Jesus said, and identity of spirit with his 
spirit, rather than . any ritualistic recitation of 
" Lord ! Lord ! " There is a great deal of cant 



46 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

and insincerity on the part of many who excuse 
their neglect of the church and public worship for 
a pretended fellowship with God in nature, though 
with some, "the groves are God's first temples" still. 

Likewise, many gloss over their mammonism with 
dishonest deceit as to the pressure of business life 
upon them, and their need of rest on the Lord's Day, 
and many others justify a false " recreation " with 
a mere subterfuge of words. But when all this is 
said, it is still true that the better side of modern 
religious life, the growing appreciation of the sim- 
plicity of the gospel, and the increasing demand for 
a Christian life as against mere lip service, play an 
important part to-day in determining the definition 
of worship which everywhere more and more pre- 
vails. And this new definition of worship, which is 
more Christian at heart, is part of the reason why 
our age seems less worshipful than the ages which 
have gone before. 

Jesus made few references to public worship, and 
when he did refer to worship, his references were 
not always of a complimentary kind. He spoke de- 
preciatingly of the long prayers of the Pharisees, 
and all the ostentation of their pretended service of 
God. He warned men against sacrifice itself when 
the worshiper was not at peace with his fellows, 
and put reconciliation with man before the offering 
of any kind of homage to God. Even the devotion 
of almsgiving was offensive to him if it lacked the 
spirit of self-effacing love. He laid no requirement 



The Gospel and Worship 47 

upon his disciples of regular attendance upon public 
worship, nor did he prescribe any forms or seasons 
for their approach to the Father. The one prayer 
that he gave was prefaced with a distinct and em- 
phatic approval of private rather than public prayer. 
Moreover, ages of religious decadence have al- 
ways made relatively more of religious worship and 
less of the actually religious life. Revivals may 
increase church attendance, and may open the 
mouths of many in public testimony and prayer 
who were silent before, and may re-establish many a 
family altar; but the deeper and more abiding they 
are, the more they draw men away from mere de- 
pendence upon churches and forms, and the more 
they emphasize spirit and life. Whenever the 
churchgoing and the testimony and the singing and 
praying become an end in themselves, the cause of 
religion is more injured than helped. Formal wor- 
ship is worse than useless when it becomes a sub- 
stitute for the life which is " hid with Christ in 
God/' that is, for spiritual fellowship with the 
divine. To appreciate the worth of worship, one 
must first of all recognize its subordinate place. 
To withstand those influences in our time which 
make against worship " in spirit and in truth/' the 
Christian of to-day must see clearly how much more 
there is in worship than time and place and form, 
and must be ready to admit that here especially 
" The letter killeth," and only the spirit " giveth 
life." 



48 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

Our word worship means originally and essen- 
tially not form, but moral attitude. Worship is a 
modification of " worth-ship." Wherever there is 
a sense of worthiness there is worship. The greater 
the sense of worthiness the more profound is the 
worship. The worship that is not based upon a 
deep sense of worthiness is really no worship at all. 
It may be nothing more than a kind of religious 
sensuousness. Such is often the effect of " a dim, 
religious light/' of the music which " hath charms 
to soothe the savage breast," yet leaves him no less 
a savage than before, of soporific incense and into- 
nation, of all the circumstance of showy ceremonial 
and pretentious rite. This is primarily an appeal to 
the senses, and not to the spirit. There may be life 
in it, but it is life girt about and all but smothered 
with unnecessary clothes. Such worship has all the 
danger and disadvantage of the fashionable woman's 
extreme devotion to dress — it dwarfs and shrivels 
the soul. On the whole, we are dressing more 
simply and more sensibly than our forebears did. 
And we are also learning more of the simplicity 
of that worship which the gospel of Christ inspires. 

When a man lifts his hat to a woman, he rec- 
ognizes the worth of womanhood, otherwise the 
courtesy is an empty form. The act is good in 
itself, but it is chiefly good as indicating what ought 
to be the habitual attitude of mind and heart on the 
part of every man toward every woman. He who 
does not reverence woman in his life, does not truly 



The Gospel and Worship 49 

show her deference at all. Likewise, when a man 
salutes the flag, he does it first of all in his heart, 
and justifies it with his life, or else his pretended 
patriotism is like unto that which Samuel Johnson 
declared " the last refuge of a scoundrel." The 
lifting of the hat to a woman and the salutation of 
the flag are not forms to be despised, but they are 
forms which need very much to be guarded against 
insincerity and the perfunctory mood. Those who 
sweep the hat lowest are often quickest to follow 
the exaggerated courtesy with some cynical re- 
mark about women. And those who make much of 
flag worship are not infrequently the hirelings and 
tools of all those forces which make most against 
the national welfare. Spread-eagleism and real 
patriotism are usually a long way apart. 

The life of Jesus was one long act of worship, 
in that his every word and deed was saturated 
with the sense of spiritual values. He taught his 
disciples to " pray without ceasing," at the same 
time that he warned them against long prayers. 
There is no contradiction here, but the profoundest 
harmony. He who does not pray always does not 
really pray at all. The prayers that God hears are 
the prayers that a man lives. " Your life speaks so 
loudly that I cannot hear what you say," is especially 
pertinent with respect to prayer. Prayer is essen- 
tially moral attitude. Singing is nothing but sound 
unless it is " making melody in your heart to the 
Lord." Kneeling has only the dubious value of an 

D 



50 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

easy-going physical exercise, unless the habitude 
of a man's life is that of reverence for the infinite 
and the eternal. Even the bread and wine of the 
communion are less than ordinary bread and butter 
if one has not learned to commune with the Father 
in all his eating and drinking, and to make a divine 
fellowship of all his intercourse with his fellows. 
Unless the sense of God is natural and habitual to 
the man, no exceptional attitude of body and no 
formal phrase from his lips can make him a wor- 
shiper of God. God has less use for form con- 
sidered apart from the life than we have for the 
corn husk after the grain is removed. Like the 
husk, the form is only good when it protects the 
life and aids its growth. 

There may be less of formal worship to-day than 
there was of old. This may, in part, be due to 
influences which are not good. It is true, how- 
ever, that formal worship is not without worth ; nay, 
it is of much worth. To strip the husk wholly away 
from the corn, especially when the corn is yet un- 
developed, is to invite disaster and death. So far, 
therefore, as conceit of knowledge leads men away 
from that " beginning of wisdom " which is " the 
fear of the Lord," or absorption in money-getting 
and pleasure-seeking tend to turn men away from 
the more abiding satisfaction and delight of waiting 
upon God, we ought not to be indifferent to the evil 
tendencies of the times. But the times are not 
wholly evil in this respect. The churches are not 



The Gospel and Worship 51 

deserted. Prayer has not ceased. Christian song 
was never so frequent and so hearty as it is now. 
There is much more of actual communion with 
God than any man can measure. And apart from 
all the forms of worship, the attitude of life which 
is the heart of worship, grows more commanding 
every day. The gospel of Christ is far from cere- 
monialism. But it is through and through a life of 
worship. It is " rejoicing in the Lord always." It is 
perpetual prayer. It is getting and keeping " in tune 
with the infinite." It is ceaseless adoration of the 
might and love and wisdom which men feel more 
and more is in all and through all and over all. To 
worship in the terms of the gospel of Christ is to 
" live and move and have one's being " every day 
in God. There was never so much of this life of 
worship in the world as there is to-day. And if the 
life of worship increases, there is no need to fear 
that any needful or helpful form of worship will 
cease to be. And those who have this spirit must 
see to it that helpful form of worship shall not cease 
to be. 

+ 4*4* 
Quiz 

1. What are the influences which make most 
against religious worship in our day? 2. How can 
real religion operate to decrease worship ? 3. What 
was the attitude of Jesus toward public worship? 
4. What is the meaning of the word, " worship," 
and what is it in spirit and in truth? 5. What 



52 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

does it mean to " pray without ceasing," and how is 
this consistent with the teaching of Jesus against 
long prayers? 

Topics for Further Study 

I. The influence of modern street railways, the 
automobile, the bicycle, and other forms of trans- 
portation upon church attendance. 2. The com- 
parative rest value of Sunday " recreations " and 
church attendance. 3. Is the appeal of music and 
art primarily sensuous or spiritual? 4. What is 
the moral value of formal worship? 5. How can 
the one who is spiritual best aid formal worship? 



CHAPTER V 

THE GOSPEL AND HOME CONDUCT 

There went the round of the papers, some years 
ago, a story, which was supposed to be humorous, 
but which was really very far from amusing to any 
thoughtful Christian man. According to the story, 
a certain man came home and found, to his indig- 
nation, that a tramp had called in his absence, and 
had been very harsh and insulting to his wife. The 
man was very much incensed, and at length, turning 
angrily upon his son, a youth of twelve or four- 
teen years of age, asked sharply, " Where were 
you, Harry, when this occurred ? " "I was in the 
woodshed," answered the boy with some confusion. 
" Couldn't you hear the man talking to your 
mother ? " demanded the father, more severely now. 
" Yes," replied the lad shamefacedly. " Then why 
didn't you interfere ? " thundered the irate father, 
ready to vent his vexation upon the child. But 
the boy made answer, still hanging his head, and 
without any impertinence in his manner, " Because, 
father, I — I — I thought it was you." 

It is hardly too much to allow that this might 
have happened in many a professedly Christian 
home. There are Christian men, at least men of 

53 



54 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

Christian profession not a few, who habitually talk 
to their wives and children in a manner which they 
would not for a moment tolerate from an outsider. 
They snarl and scold and browbeat in a way in 
which no gentleman would address a stranger of 
either sex. And in this respect it is only fair to 
say women are sometimes almost, if not quite, as 
bad. They nag and whine and fret and fume in the 
home, and are all smiles and graciousness on the 
outside. So also, in many a Christian home, brothers 
and sisters indulge in language toward each other 
which they would not stand from anybody else. 
Many a Christian boy, if overheard by his girl 
friends talking to his sister or mother after the 
manner in which he frequently " talks back " at 
them, would hardly lift his face before his friends 
again. And the sisters are not by any means fault- 
less with respect to their manners toward their inti- 
mates in the home. 

This bad behavior in the home does not mean 
that genuine affection is lacking between those who 
thus abuse each other. Often people who strive 
with each other irascibly all day long will resent 
bitterly any slightest reflection by an outsider upon 
the object of their ordinary irritation. Even the 
mother who hardly ever gives her child a pleasant 
look or a pleasant word will slave for the lad far 
into the night, and will weep over his coffin in an 
utterly heartbroken way when the aggravating 
feet and hands are forever stilled. Perhaps the 



The Gospel and Home Conduct 55 

saddest thing about our frequent bad behavior 
toward each other in the home is the fact that we 
cover up with roughness and harshness the tender- 
ness we would give the world to express. But we 
are afraid of sentiment, and ashamed of our own 
awkwardness when we try to be gentle to each other, 
and it is wofully easy to vent our irritation and 
weariness and depression of spirits upon others, 
especially upon those who know us and love us, so 
that we can presume upon their love as we dare not 
presume upon the courtesy of a stranger. We 
know, and we feel sure that they know, the sincerity 
of our affection for them, in spite of the discourteous 
and often disgraceful manner in which we talk and 
act toward them. Our very sincerity is more than 
half the reason for our severity. 

Nor does all this rudeness mean that the Chris- 
tian profession of those who are guilty of this harsh 
and unhappy home conduct is nothing but pious 
pretense. They are often quite as sincere in their 
love for God and for the things of the kingdom of 
God as they are genuine in their affection toward 
the loved ones whom they abuse. There is a wide 
distance between insincerity and inconsistency. It 
is neither wise nor just to impeach altogether a 
man's Christian character because he sometimes acts 
like a boor in the home. But when he is acting the 
boor, he is certainly not acting the Christian part. 
If the gospel is an actual saving power here and 
now, it ought to give us the victory in the home. 



56 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

And the gospel will, when it is faithfully applied in 
every aspect of everyday life. When every allow- 
ance is made for the sincerity of our affection for 
our kindred and household, despite our unloving 
manners toward them, and for the genuineness of 
our religious profession despite the frequent viola- 
tion of Christian courtesy and decency in the privacy 
of the family circle, it is still true that failure in 
Christian living at home is both dangerous to the 
home and disastrous to the whole development of 
character. No man rises very much higher than his 
home life. 

There is a kind of cowardice about this rudeness 
at home which ought to go far to shame us out of 
it when it is rightly understood. We take liberties 
with our loved ones which we simply do not dare 
to take with strangers. They would not stand for 
the tone in which we often speak in the home, let 
alone the insulting roughness of what we say. If 
they did not retaliate in kind they would surely 
" cut us " from that hour. The intimates of the 
home can hardly do so. They may, indeed, answer 
back after the same manner, which does but make 
the matter worse. They cannot very well cut us 
out of the circle of their acquaintance, and refuse 
to have anything further to do with us as outsiders 
may very justly do. Therefore, we ought to be the 
gentler toward them, because of their very helpless- 
ness against us. If we are not so, it is because we 
are taking a coward's advantage of their situation, 



The Gospel and Home Conduct 57 

and doing toward them what we lack the courage to 
do on a level where our rudeness would meet its 
adequate reward. The more cowardly a man or boy- 
is, the more likely he is to play the boor at home. 

Moreover, the manner in which we excuse our- 
selves for our bad conduct at home is often anything 
but honest. " Mamma," said a sharp-witted little 
girl, who had been savagely taken to task by her 
mother for a show of ill temper, " why do you call 
it ' cross ' when it's me, and ' nervous ' when its 
you ? " Most of us are exceedingly ready with 
excuses when we ourselves are irritable and disa- 
greeable and sharp tongued and peevishly fault- 
finding. We are " tired," or " fatigued," or " not 
feeling very well," or we have " an awful head- 
ache"; indeed, we can find a hundred reasons for 
our mean conduct except the simple truth that we 
are in bad temper and have not the Christian candor 
and courage to control ourselves. When we are 
willing to own the truth, and to lay the chief blame 
where it belongs, at our own door, we shall be 
already on the way to victory over the infirmities 
of our disposition. 

This is not to deny that life at home is some- 
times truly more trying than it is on the outside. 
Life's little irritations have their opportunity against 
us when we are doing the daily drudgery and meet- 
ing the very commonplace experiences of the fire- 
side as they have not when we are dressed in our 
best, and looking our best, and we meet men and 



58 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

women on the serener levels of social intercourse. 
It is always easier to keep the flies out of the parlor 
than it is to keep them out of the kitchen. The 
buzzing, stinging, irritating little annoyances of life 
also like the warm, sticky, and stifling atmosphere 
of hard, prosaic work. Or they are like the dust 
which fills the city streets, and puts a man's temper 
on edge, when the same man would walk with smi- 
ling memories of his boyhood thronging all the 
chambers of his soul as he pressed softly the green 
sward of the country field. The grit that gets 
into our shoes is more trying to us by far than the 
big boulders over which we climb with conscious 
ease. So many a man and woman who will meet a 
great trial with strong uplift of soul will fail miser- 
ably to meet like a Christian the grit of the com- 
mon day's work. Gulliver, in the land of the Lilli- 
putians, could break any single rope with which they 
sought to bind him ; but when they found him pros- 
trate and tied their thousand threads to every 
tenderest part of him that was exposed, weaving 
the web into his hair, he found these threads, and 
the thousands of tiny darts discharged against him 
when he tried to break away, too much for him. 
The Lilliputians are in all our homes, and their 
little threads and darts are more dangerous to our 
Christian liberty and to Christian serenity of soul 
than any Apollyon's sword that can be wielded 
against us. 

The home was the patriarchal church. It is still 



The Gospel and Home Conduct 59 

the first place in which to build our altars to the 
Lord. Worship, as already emphasized, is primarily 
an attitude of the soul. And the primary place to 
demonstrate that attitude is the home. If a man's 
life is filled with the sense of God he will not forget 
God at his own hearthside. " If a man have not the 
spirit of Christ, he is none of his." And if the 
spirit of Christ is in the man, he will not wholly 
fail of showing forth that spirit in the most inti- 
mate and trying situations of home life. For man 
or woman the foremost test of the genuineness of 
faith and love toward Christ is its working worth 
in the home circle, what it actually accomplishes 
to raise the level of decency and discipline in the 
home. 

Neither in the home nor anywhere else is the all 
in all of religion pleasure. There is a difference 
between friction and irritation, between authority 
and asperity. We are not likely wholly to eliminate 
friction for a while, if we ever do. Neither have 
we wholly passed from under the need of authority. 
A Christian home life does not mean an easy- 
going indifference to the infraction of reasonable 
rules, or the ignoring of mutual rights. " I never 
knew but one man without a temper," remarked a 
certain excellent woman who, like Will Carleton's 
" Betsey," had " a temper of her own," and she 
added with a wry laugh, " and he was the most 
aggravating man that I ever knew." There is 
nothing necessarily unchristian in the possession of 



60 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

a temper. Indeed, the " possession " of a temper is 
not that to which moralists generally object, it is 
rather the " losing " of one's temper ; in other 
words, the not possessing it enough to have control 
over it. A Christian home is not a home without 
temper in it, but it is a home where temper is 
under the control of Christian motive and Christian 
forbearance. We may go farther and say that a 
Christian home life is not in terms of reasonable 
ordinary expectation a faultless regime of exact 
righteousness. David was a man of many blem- 
ishes. He was " a man after God's own heart " ; 
not because he was always right in conduct, but 
rather because the prevailing disposition of his life 
was right. He loved, and loved generously, and 
was not too proud to be penitent nor too self- 
opinionated to be brokenhearted over his own short- 
comings. So also was Peter a man of many in- 
firmities of daily life, a big blunderer in his ways, 
but as big-hearted in his tears and self-rebukings as 
he was hasty and impetuous in his speech. We love 
him, not for his faultlessness, but for his essential 
and enduring lovingness. A Christian home life 
will not be always pleasant. It will not be without 
friction, and certainly not without authority. It 
will not be without its frequent faults and failures. 
To expect too much of it is to invite the discourage- 
ment which makes for worse defeat. But it will be 
animated with a Christian purpose, the spirit of 
mutual service, and the friction and fault of it will 



The Gospel and Home Conduct 61 

be mitigated and in increasing measure overcome by 
a willing forgiveness of offenses and a ready recog- 
nition of " the law of Christ." 

In the largest way this is the test of the working 
of the gospel in home life. It is very much to be 
desired that courtesy should prevail in the intimacies 
of the home circle. Harshness and rudeness are 
shamefully out of place in a Christian home. The 
young man or young woman who professes to love 
Christ, and bears testimony thereto in public meet- 
ing, ought to seek with painstaking conscientious- 
ness to testify for Christ in the much more difficult 
declaration of the daily life, and especially in a 
decent and orderly walk at home. But let us not 
lose sight here of what the distinctive thing about 
the gospel really is. The gospel is not simply a 
moral code. It is very much more. There may be 
social and moral propriety without the dominating 
doctrine of Christ. His gospel is, indeed, a life; 
but it is much more than an outwardly correct life, 
more even than a life which is correct in outward 
appearance when viewed from the close standpoint 
of the fireside. The life is only Christian when it is 
through and through a life of love. We must strive 
for perfection, indeed, and perfection will not be 
satisfied merely to " mean well " the while we are 
carelessly doing evil. We must not continue in 
sin " that grace may abound," continue in unloving 
conduct and excuse it by claiming that nevertheless 
we have the loving spirit. If we are faithful to 



62 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

love within us it will certainly manifest itself in 
word and deed. Yet it is not propriety nor out- 
ward perfectness by which we may know the Chris- 
tian home first of all. It is the Christian spirit 
rather, the spirit of humility, the spirit of forgive- 
ness, the spirit of readiness to be reconciled; it is 
the spirit of the self-effacingness and all-lovingness 
of the cross. The Fifty-first psalm, the Beatitudes 
of Jesus, the Master's prayer on the cross, these 
are all tokens of that mind which ought to dis- 
tinguish the Christian home. 

And nowhere are the rewards of Christian living 
larger than they are at home. To have the approval 
of " them that are without " is worth while for any 
Christian; but how much more does it mean to 
have the approval of them that are within the range 
of the most intimate daily life? To lead a stranger 
to Christ is an unspeakable privilege, but so to 
live and speak as to lead one's own brother or sister 
to the Master is to reap a double reward. It is not 
without meaning that we have this record concern- 
ing Andrew, " he first findeth his own brother 
Simon." If our Christian living does not " find " 
those who are nearest to us, there is something 
seriously the matter with it. And if it does, there 
is unspeakable comfort in the high compliment of 
such confidence, there is an assurance which the 
world will not be slow to appreciate that our foun- 
dations are sound, and there is a foretaste already 
in the rich enjoyments of a Christian home life 



The Gospel and Home Conduct 63 

of that better life beyond which we cannot conceive 
as yet, but which we do most significantly suggest 
when we speak of heaven as our everlasting home. 

Quiz 

I. How do you explain the frequent boorishness 
toward each other of members of the same family 
who are sincerely fond of one another? 2. Can a 
man be habitually discourteous in the family circle 
and yet be a Christian? 3. Has a Christian a right 
to be severe under any circumstances in the exercise 
of family authority? 4. What is a Christian tem- 
per? 5. What are the chief marks of a Christian 
spirit ? 

Topics for Further Study 

I. Are we growing away from home life? 2. Is 
family worship every day desirable and practicable 
in the average modern home? 3. How shall we de- 
velop a helpful candor in the home as to matters of 
religious experience? 4. Is the average of home 
conduct improving, and if so, is this directly re- 
lated to the improved status of woman? 5. Would 
a more equal participation of woman in public life 
make for more Christian standards at home? 



CHAPTER VI 

THE GOSPEL WORKING IN THE CHURCH 

There is a disposition in many quarters to-day to 
put " churchianity " and Christianity in opposition 
to each other. One notable instance has been much 
cited, concerning an audience of working men in 
New York City, who applauded the name of Christ, 
and hissed immediately afterward the mention of 
the church. All over the land there are many who 
speak respectfully of Jesus who criticize most harsh- 
ly all the churches which profess to speak in his 
name. It is comparatively easy to get a whole con- 
gregation to rise if the question is one of Christian 
faith. It is more and more difficult to get those who 
acquiesce in the reasonableness of religion and the 
claims of Christ to admit the claims of church-mem- 
bership and church activity upon them. 

Yet, the churches were never so numerous as 
they are to-day, and probably on the whole, never so 
effective. There was never so much of the gospel 
outside of the churches as there is to-day, and there 
was never so much of the gospel inside of the 
churches. In spite of all real and apparent opposi- 
tion to the churches, the gospel is working in and 
through them as never before, and more than half 
64 



The Gospel Working in the Church 65 

the protest against them is an indirect tribute to 
them, the tribute of men who have learned from 
the churches how much more the churches ought 
to be. Those who are most impatient with the 
churches now, would be many fold more impatient 
if they were brought face to face with the church 
life of other centuries. Even the " apostolic 
churches," which we have exceedingly idealized, 
would probably prove profoundly disappointing if 
we immediately confronted them. 

How difficult it is to find men and women of 
intelligence now, and with any appreciation of 
Christian ideas and ideals who have not, at one 
time or another, shared the beneficent ministry of 
the Sunday-school. They may boast that they have 
not been inside a church " in twenty years," but if 
you catch them unawares they will boast quite as 
emphatically that they know all about the churches 
because, in youth, they were regular frequenters of 
the Sunday-school or, even " forced to go to church 
three times a day." This is an admission in fact, 
if not in form, that so much of the gospel as has 
found them, came to them through the church, next 
to the direct ministry of the home. And with 
many of them the home training was religiously 
negative, and all that they have learned of Chris- 
tian precept and principle they have gathered from 
the Sunday-school or from occasional attendance 
upon the preaching of the word. 

Very few even of those who work in the Sunday- 



66 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

school to-day apprehend how widespread the in- 
fluence of the Sunday-school is. It is not only true 
that the majority of those who join the churches 
come to church-membership by way of the Sunday- 
school ; but, as already suggested, the Sunday-school 
reaches in very influential ways a multitude who are 
lost to church attendance in later years. Undoubt- 
edly it is a misfortune that the churches do not hold 
them. But just as when our loved ones die we are 
apt to think of the fact that we have lost them more 
than we do of the fact that we have had them ; so 
do we sometimes over-emphasize the fact that the 
church does not hold all who have been under its 
instruction, and ignore the value of the fact that at 
least the church had much to do with the shaping of 
their lives for a little while. Much more than half 
of the decency and respectability of the world out- 
side of the churches is due to the touch of the 
gospel upon these men and women in their impres- 
sionable years before they turned aside from the 
Sunday-school. If the Sunday-schools did no more 
than this, they would be well worth while. In fact, 
the Sunday-schools do a great deal more. Much 
of their teaching is very superficial, but there is very 
little of it which is not, in some degree, beneficial. 
Moreover, the character of the work is greatly im- 
proving from year to year. There are few better 
ways of learning what the gospel is than to attempt 
to teach it conscientiously in a modern Sunday- 
school. Expression makes for impression. Espe- 






The Gospel Working in the Church 67 

cially does explanation within the range of the un- 
derstanding of a child bring one back to the things 
that are of first importance in the gospel of Christ. 
This is another indirect ministry of the Sunday- 
schools. They are unsurpassed gymnasiums for 
the exercise of all those who teach and work 
in them. He is a very poor teacher who does not 
learn more than his scholars. To get at the very 
heart of the gospel, one needs to try to tell it 
over and over, week after week, to a child. It is 
possible, of course, merely to entertain the child. It 
is easier yet simply to compel the attention of the 
child without so much as entertaining him. But the 
young Christian who goes at it right, and stays with 
the task faithfully, will sooner or later learn to know 
some of the deep things of the gospel through in- 
terpreting the Scriptures to the understanding of 
girls and boys. What the Sunday-schools are doing 
in general moral influence upon those whom the 
churches do not hold is worth while. What the 
Sunday-schools are doing for those who operate 
them and are teachers in them through the reflex 
influence of their work upon themselves is even 
more worth while. And, besides this, there is the 
incalculable worth of the work for those who are 
thereby led to accept the gospel and give them- 
selves to the service of the kingdom of God. No 
man who knows what the gospel is, and believes in 
it, can for a minute despise its working in the Sun- 
day-school to-day. 



68 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

In the minds of many, the young people's move- 
ment has spent its force. If this is true, its force 
has not been spent in vain. It has added very much 
to the cheerfulness of present-day religion. Edward 
Payson and Francis E. Clark were pastors in the 
same city, of churches of the same denomination. 
Their ministries fell only a little more than half a 
century apart. There is no doubt that Edward 
Payson was a saint, according to the standards of 
his time. He was certainly esteemed as such by the 
Christian community in New England a century 
ago. It is said that on a single morning the birth 
notices in the Boston papers showed six little 
Edward Paysons to whom the name of the New 
England saint had been given. Yet he was a most 
melancholy and even morbid saint. The contrast 
between Payson and Clark is much more than per- 
sonal, otherwise it would not be mentioned here. 
It is the contrast between the ascetic, John the Bap- 
tist piety of the puritanism of yesterday and the 
saner, sounder, and far more Christian type of re- 
ligion which prevails to-day. The young people's 
movement in the churches has done much to de- 
liver us from the unnatural and unhealthful serious- 
ness of the religion of a century ago. The whole- 
some manliness and happy helpfulness of " Father 
Endeavor " Clark is typical of the whole movement 
in which he has played such honorable part. Our 
young people's movement may be " too light " in 
many of its manifestations, but it is certainly much 



The Gospel Working in the Church 69 

more like the ministry of Jesus than the sickly 
sentimentalism and exaggerated sanctimoniousness 
which was mistaken for Christianity awhile ago. 
Even so good a tract as " The Dairyman's Daugh- 
ter," marks the melancholy of ordinary religious 
propaganda until recent times. The very Sunday- 
schools used to teach the children to sing: 

"I want to be an angel, 

And with the angels stand, 
A crown upon my forehead, 
And a harp within my hand." 

A sentiment this which never for a minute belonged 
to any sensible child. If the young people's move- 
ment has done its work, it has done its work well in 
hastening the departure of this hypochondria in 
religion. 

But it remains to be proved that the young peo- 
ple's movement has spent its force. There is very 
much to show that it has not. The young people's 
societies are still with us, and a multitude of them 
are doing very effective work. The work might be 
both deeper and broader than it is. " Confessing 
Christ " is good, but it ought to mean something 
more than a parrotlike repetition of a familiar 
phrase, and a half-hearted request for the prayers of 
other people as a kind of easy substitute for earnest 
and thoughtful effort on one's own behalf. " Ral- 
lies " are all right, if they mark real progress ; but 



jo The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

a standard that stands still, though it may serve as 
a May-pole jfor mere merrymakers to go around and 
around, will never lead an army to victory. It is 
rather pitiful to find in a prominent Eastern city, 
which is filled all summer long with visitors from all 
over the world, that the Christian young people's 
societies have adjourned for a period of months, 
and the only sign of their existence is a momentary 
revival for the sake of a moonlight excursion upon 
the bay. Yet, to reason from these things that the 
gospel is not working, and working to very good 
effect in and through the young people's societies, 
is to confess ignorance of much of the most vital 
Christian literature and the most wholesome and 
enterprising Christian life of our time. 

In this study of the working of the church in 
modern life, the Sunday-school and the young peo- 
ple's societies are put first, not because they are 
necessarily first in their demonstration of the gos- 
pel, but because they are most immediately related 
to the young Christian, and through them the young 
Christian comes into vital, personal activity in the 
church. The Sunday-school of a church is nearly 
always what its young people are. It can be made 
more effective only as they become more effective. 
In point of intelligence it is seldom beyond the intel- 
lectual life of the young people. It is not always up 
to them in this respect. It is for them to make it so. 
It is for them to make the Sunday-school also an 
effective evangelistic and missionary agency. At 



The Gospel Working in the Church Ji 

no point is there nobler opportunity for enlargement 
and improvement in Christian service than through 
intelligent, painstaking devotion upon the part of the 
young men and young women of the church to the 
best type of Sunday-school service. Their own so- 
ciety is less important than the Sunday-school. Yet 
their own society can be made, next to the Sunday- 
school, the most immediately effective auxiliary of 
the church. Its prayer meetings can be made promo- 
tive of something more than a trite and tasteless testi- 
mony through indolent indulgence in formal phrase- 
ology. Its socials can be broadened and deepened so 
as to be beyond all suspicion of caste and clique 
feeling and frivolous entertainment, and so as to 
answer to the profoundest longings of the heart of 
youth for worthy fellowship and real enjoyment of 
life. Our young people's societies do not begin to 
make what they ought to make of their literary op- 
portunity. They ought to stimulate right reading 
on the part of their members. They ought to offer 
the best in books and pamphlets to all who attend 
upon their meetings. They ought to utilize the de- 
nominational papers for a good clipping bureau, 
the clippings to be arranged somewhat after the 
card index style, and kept for ready reference where 
all the members of the church can get at them. 
They ought especially to be in touch with the best 
social service of their own community, keeping their 
members informed about it, and as far as they can, 
getting into active touch with such service them- 



J2 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

selves. In a word, the young people's society ought 
to be a kind of a committee of the whole on the 
part of the youth of the church to keep the church in 
contact with the freshest developments of Christian 
thought and manifestations of Christian activity. 
Every good work in the community ought to feel 
their hand in sympathetic touch upon it. They 
ought to hold what the Sunday-school has gained, 
and recover very much of what the Sunday-school 
has lost. 

When all has been said that can be said for Sun- 
day-school and young people's society, and every 
other auxiliary of the church, the pulpit is still the 
citadel of the church. When the pulpit is weak, 
the church is weak. When the pulpit is strong, the 
church is strong. The strength of the pulpit is in 
the strength of her youth. Nor is it only in the 
strength of her young men. The young women who 
are to be ministers' wives are a very large factor in 
the strength or weakness of the pulpit. Much more 
than this may be said. Henry Ward Beecher once 
said, " The minister gives back to the people in 
showers what he takes up from them in vapor." 
Sometimes he takes up very little, and sometimes 
he takes up very much. A congregation makes a 
minister quite as much as a minister makes a con- 
gregation. The Gospel " according to Luke " is 
also the Gospel according to Theophilus. When you 
write a letter, the one you are writing to is also the 
one you are writing through. Very few Christians 



The Gospel Working in the Church 73 

begin to recognize what part they have in every 
sermon they hear. Ten hearers are worth ten hun- 
dred sneerers to bring out the best that is in a man. 
Jesus sent men forth to testify of " what great 
things the Lord had done for them," but quite as 
emphatically he reiterated, " He that hath ears to 
hear, let him hear." His own preaching failed 
where a sympathetic hearing was lacking. The pul- 
pit of to-day would be a hundredfold more effective 
in winning the world to the gospel if instead of a 
careless, captious, conventional, or merely conserv- 
ative hearing the members of the churches, and 
especially the younger members, listened with 
whole-hearted devotion to the truth, with sincere 
desire for self-advancement, and with an intelligent 
appreciation of what real preaching is. 

With all its faults and failures, the church is 
still the main medium for carrying the gospel to the 
world. Its work is of primary and permanent im- 
portance at the point of contact with childhood and 
youth. The young Christian will do well to put 
much of the emphasis of his own activity and assist- 
ance there. He ought to seek continually to enlarge 
and improve the working of the gospel through the 
church in these beginnings of the gospel in human 
lives. But let not the young Christian cease here. 
The pulpit has need of him, and indirectly but most 
importantly need of her. The pulpit is, and must 
remain, for many generations yet the immediate 
voice of the gospel to men. Never was the gospel 



74 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

working so mightily as it is working in the pulpit 
of our time. Yet it suffers tremendously from the 
handicap of the pew. And here and there it is 
greatly helped by the pew, and especially by the 
pew where the young Christian sits, thinking the 
best thought of our time, eager to know the best 
that life has to give, ready to translate and trans- 
mit the message through all the innumerable op- 
portunities which are open only to youth. Through 
such as these the gospel is working, indeed, in and 
through the church of to-day. 

Quiz 

i. What are the chief lines of helpful influence 
on the part of the Sunday-school ? 2. Mention some 
marked contribution of the young people's move- 
ment to modern religious life. 3. What literary 
service is open to the young people of the church? 
4. What is the importance of the pulpit in modern 
life? 5. What constitutes a good hearer? 

Topics for Further Study 

1. What is a "call" to the ministry? 2. What 
claim, if any, has the church upon the minister's 
wife? 3. What place should be given in the Sun- 
day-school to the results of modern biblical criti- 
cism ? 4. Has the young people's movement as such 
passed its zenith? 5. Does public criticism of the 
churches do more harm than good? 



CHAPTER VII 

THE GOSPEL WORKING FOR SOCIAL BETTERMENT 

The most serious handicap upon the working of 
the gospel to-day is the fact that the church, the 
main medium of the gospel, belongs too exclusively 
to the " better classes." We have gotten too far 
away from the " common people," who heard the 
gospel gladly from the lips of the Carpenter of 
Nazareth, whom we call Saviour and Lord. We are 
as respectable to-day as the people who crucified 
him long ago. And, if the meaning of Christ is the 
incarnation of God in humanity, there is much more 
danger than most of us are willing to allow, that 
our respectability may mistakenly crucify him again. 
For, whenever we crucify humanity, we do actually 
crucify him. Neither can we despise and maltreat 
the dependent and the defective classes, or refuse 
to carry the burdens of " them that are weak," 
without refusing the " mind of Christ " and putting 
him to our treadmill, or selling him for silver once 
more. 

I walked in the city of Washington, on the splen- 
did pavement between those more splendid build- 
ings, the Hall of Congress and the Congressional 
Library. There passed between us and the library 

75 



j6 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

a plain, two-wheeled cart, which jolted over the 
pavement most inharmoniously. In the cart were 
perhaps a dozen Negro convicts, dressed in dull, 
dirty, striped suits of dark gray, with sodden faces 
and listless eyes. They seemed utterly and absurdly 
out of place there. Yet, they held my eyes and my 
heart, and the remembrance of them is keener than 
all the beauty and splendor that I saw that day. As 
they wheeled sullenly and slowly by, I remarked to 
the companion at my side, " If Jesus Christ were 
here, he would care more about those dozen Negro 
convicts in that cart there than he would about 
all the spectacular public buildings in this capital 
city." And I verily believe that beyond question I 
spoke the truth. 

The biggest thing about Christianity is the de- 
mocracy of Jesus, the most absolute and uncom- 
promising democracy the world has ever seen. This 
is the meaning of the nativity of Jesus : that when 
God would enter. into humanity, he chose humanity 
shorn of all its trappings and trimmings. This is 
the meaning of Nazareth, and the carpenter's bench. 
This is the meaning of the fishermen who followed 
with him, and the women toward whom Jesus 
showed no sex-consciousness, but whom he treated 
simply as souls. If the church were as democratic 
as Jesus, she would be crucified to-day, and would 
rise again in all the power of his resurrection. 

This is preeminently the problem of our time, to 
interpret the democracy of Jesus into terms of 



The Gospel and Social Betterment jj 

modern life. We are afraid to do it and, therefore, 
the church has only half a following. Architecture, 
sculpture, literature, painting, music, institutions, 
and laws, these things are more to us than men. 
And until men, even Negro convicts, are more to 
us than all of these we are not more than partial 
and very imperfect followers of Christ. 

How are we going to get at it ? Not by " mis- 
sions " and " slumming tours," and " rummage 
sales " for the poor, and giving away our second- 
hand clothes. These things are- not altogether vain 
if they are not done in a vain spirit. But they are 
mere makeshifts at the best. Even " institutional 
churches" and "social settlements" are not sufficient 
to bridge the chasm between the respectable and the 
disreputable, between the classes and the masses, 
between ourselves and our conventional Christianity 
and our Lord and Master, who was known as " a 
friend of publicans and sinners." In the last analy- 
sis the problem is spiritual, not institutional ; moral, 
not formal; and its solution is in the heart, and not 
in anything which head and hand alone can do. It 
is fortunate that this is so because the institutional 
church and the social settlement are hardly prac- 
ticable for all. It costs money to begin them, and it 
costs a good deal more money to maintain them. 
And like the Y. M. C. A., their emphasis tends 
toward the temporal and the physical. This is not 
to undervalue their work. The temporal and the 
physical are with us, and as in former times, " fools 



78 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

who came to scoff remained to pray," much more is 
it true that men who come for soup do sometimes 
get a real inner salvation, and young men who learn 
the latest in athletics sometimes learn that more 
ancient wisdom, that " bodily exercise is profitable 
for a little, but godliness is profitable unto all things, 
having promise of the life which now is, and of that 
which is to come." But all who have had anything 
to do with what is commonly called institutional 
work, if they have themselves any spiritual vision 
and have entered into the heart of the Christian ex- 
perience will confess that the results of this material 
ministry are often profoundly disappointing and 
exceedingly meager in genuinely spiritual results. 
Institutional work is better than a purely dogmatic 
work, and the institutional church is richer in life 
product than many a church which mistakes ritual 
or theological definition for Christianity. But this 
type of social betterment work is not practicable in 
every place, and if it were, it would not solve the 
social problems of our day. The solution lies in the 
realm of the spirit, and is not only sufficient to all 
the need, but it is also open to those who follow 
Jesus everywhere. 

" What shall we do that we might work the works 
of God ? " asked the Jews of old. And this was 
Jesus' own reply : " This is the work of God, that 
ye believe on him whom he hath sent." And this 
is still the answer, and it is sufficient to the social 
problem of our time. The first great work of the 



The Gospel and Social Betterment 79 

church if it is going to " reach the masses " is to be- 
lieve on Jesus, to catch his spirit, to share his ideal, 
to live his life among men, to incarnate human needs 
and bear the burden of human sorrow and suffering 
and sin with him. Nothing less than this will do, 
whether it is ritual, dogma, or institution. Work 
for social betterment is first and fundamentally the 
realization of social identity with all our fellow-men 
through fellowship with the Son of man. 

The first thing a young Christian, or any other 
Christian can do to help his fellows who are less 
competent or less comfortable than himself, is to 
try to understand them. It is easy enough to pat- 
ronize peculiar activities of one kind and another to 
very little profit. The fruit of this sort of activity 
may be only pharisaic pride on the one side, and ill- 
concealed contempt on the other side. This is 
where many of our " city missions " fail. Likewise 
social betterment work is a delusion and a snare 
if it is undertaken in anything less than a spirit of 
absolutely honest human fellowship. And if a man 
has an absolutely honest human fellowship in him, 
he will find ways to express it effectively, whether 
ordinary social betterment work is open to him or 
not. Let him get right with his fellows first of all 
himself, then shall he see clearly in what ways he 
may help them most in his own particular situation 
and with his own peculiar gifts. 

We have heard much about " getting right with 
God." No man is right with God who is not right 



80 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

with men. " If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and 
there rememberest that thy brother hath ought 
against thee: Leave there thy gift before the altar, 
and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, 
and then come and offer thy gift." To paraphrase 
this saying of Jesus a little, " Get right with men 
if you would get right with God." No man loves 
God who hates his fellows. Neither does any man 
honor God who despises his fellows. The man who 
rejects or contemns anything that is human, there- 
by rejects and contemns something that is divine. 
We measure our actual attitude toward God always 
by our actual attitude toward men. Misunderstand 
men and you misunderstand God. Misuse men and 
you misuse God. Take men lightly and you take 
God lightly. The way into the heart of the eternal 
is forever through the heart of humankind. 

Social betterment work at the bottom is a matter 
of individual moral attitude toward men. The spirit 
of it, which is always the important thing about it, 
is just as much at home in the Sunday-school as it 
is in the Y. M. C. A. It is just as applicable to 
the church social as to the soup kitchen or the social 
settlement bath. The young people's society may act 
as a channel for it just as truly as a labor lecture 
course. It will make the pulpit live again, and will 
go farther than any amount of entertainment to fill 
up the empty pews. 

The biggest thing that any one of us can do for 
social betterment is to better our own relations to 



The Gospel and Social Betterment 81 

our fellows, one and all. Begin at home by working 
out the gospel there in the difficult role of family 
and neighborhood intimacies. Carry your zeal for 
social betterment into Sunday-school and young 
people's society, and church, and let it work there 
for the disintegration of all overemphasis of indi- 
vidual rights and privileges. Social betterment 
would come a great deal faster in the world outside 
if there were less of egotism and exclusiveness in 
religious circles. A church that is not truly demo- 
cratic is not truly Christian. The pomp and para- 
phernalia of Romanism are offensive to many of 
us, since they seem to contradict so glaringly the 
simplicity of the gospel of Christ. Yet many Prot- 
estant churches are really more exclusive than 
Rome, more provincial, more dominated by this or 
that person or clique. The largest service the 
churches can do to the cause of social betterment is 
first of all to give themselves whole-heartedly to the 
democratic spirit, to open their doors to men and 
women without respect to intellectual or moral 
caste lines. Let the churches, like the individual, 
begin at home. Charity does not mean first of all 
almsgiving. What it does mean let the thirteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians declare. This is the 
charity which properly begins at home. When the 
church recognizes that eloquence and knowledge 
and prophecy and faith and almsgiving and even 
martyrdom for the truth's sake are less than love, 
and when within her own borders she shows forth 



82 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

that long-suffering, all-enduring, and all-compre- 
hending love which the apostle so wonderfully an- 
alyzes, then will her ministry for social betterment 
be like unto the ministry of Jesus himself. 

There is especial need of the democracy of Jesus, 
the appreciation of man as man, in all reformatory 
work. " The Son of man was revealed that he 
might destroy the works of the devil." And he is 
destroying them like " a consuming fire." But no 
man is quite fit to join him in this purifying work 
until he has cleansed himself of pride and egotism 
and the idea that he belongs to some superior sort 
of man. Temperance reform is a splendid work for 
social betterment, and a man can hardly identify 
himself too positively with the movement for a 
sober city or a sober State. But temperance work 
is too often touched with phariseeism. It is easier 
to fight the rum-seller than it is to save the rum- 
drinker. The strongest point that the saloons have 
in their fight against the churches is that they are 
often vastly more democratic. We shall never 
destroy the saloon in our great cities till the 
churches have made their cause much more the 
cause of the common man, and till the formalism of 
religious worship is more displaced by a healthful, 
hearty, human quality such as one finds in a certain 
crude way in the ordinary saloon. Let the young 
Christian who goes into reform work be very care- 
ful that he does not get away from the large hu- 
manity of Christ. He ought to be at least as demo- 



The Gospel and Social Betterment 83 

cratic as the man in the street. If he is true to his 
Master he will be more democratic in fact. 

Both the individual Christian and the individual 
church in whom this spirit of true Christian de- 
mocracy abides, will find a multitude of ways of 
serving the cause of social betterment in their own 
particular place. Institutional features of one kind 
and another will be found which are adaptable to 
almost any situation. In this respect much of orig- 
inality and freedom is to be desired. We are all 
overmuch prone to copy forms of service, rather 
than to seek the spirit and then allow it to work 
itself out to fit our own peculiar opportunities and 
needs. The Emmanuel Church found its own work, 
a work which is practicable also, it may be granted, 
in many other places. It does not follow, however, 
that the same spirit in which the Emmanuel Church 
went to work to serve the poor and the needy and 
the suffering of Boston will work out in the same 
measures for every country village church. Neither 
can every church be a Judson Memorial Institu- 
tional Church, nor a Moody's Institute. It is very 
hard to imitate and keep up first quality. Social 
needs are so complex, social opportunities so mani- 
fold, and life is so continually seeking to express 
itself in new forms, that we may well be cautious 
lest we mistake some borrowed motion toward 
social betterment for the one essential thing, the 
spirit of a Christlike identification of ourselves 
with our fellow-men. If we love men as Christ 



84 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

loved them, we shall find our own ways in our own 
time and our own circumstances to make that love 
manifest to them. And if we lack that love, all our 
institutions and good ideas will be very largely in 
vain. 

Because the social problem is so emphatically our 
problem to-day, and because the social spirit is 
breaking out in a hundred different ways, it is of 
first importance that we shall make no mistake here 
as to what is really the first thing. Social better- 
ment does not necessarily mean that all our churches 
shall be institutional churches of the same type; or, 
indeed, of any recognized institutional type. It does 
not necessitate any kind of uniformity of method, 
but only a great Christian unity of mood. Let the 
young Christian learn the mind of Christ; that is, 
the mood of Christ toward men, and let him make 
that mood his own in relation to the men and wo- 
men among whom he lives; let him use the church 
and the Sunday-school and the young people's so- 
ciety, and every other instrument and agency which 
he can influence to carry out this mood toward men ; 
but let him never forget that the mind, the mood, 
the living spirit, is the beginning and end of it all. 
Social betterment will not come with anything less 
than a better social spirit on the part of us all. 
" The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but 
righteousness, and peace, and joy in the spirit of 
holiness. " And this is open to us all. Dream not 
of millions with which you would endow this or 



The Gospel and Social Betterment 85 

that good work. Nor yet of this or that device with 
which you will recreate the world. Rather seek for 
yourself that spirit which, if made perfect in all, 
would make all things perfect, and remember that 
the largest contribution which you or any one else 
can make toward the betterment of men is a heart 
which is wholly one with human sufferings and 
human needs and the very highest human ends. 

* + ►£■ 
Quiz 

1. In what way is respectability a danger to the 
church? 2. Was there any sex-consciousness in the 
teaching of Jesus? 3. What is the fundamental 
thing in social betterment? 4. How is getting 
right with men related to getting right with God? 
5. What are the difficulties in the way of general 
" institutional " methods as a part of ordinary 
church work? 6. What is a real Christian de- 
mocracy of spirit? 

Topics for Further Study 

1. Are the churches respectable because they ap- 
peal most to the respectable classes, or because re- 
ligion tends, through correct habits of life, to ma- 
terial well-being? 2. Does the democracy of Jesus 
imply ultimate social equality everywhere? 3. Is 
almsgiving on the whole an evil or a good ? 4. Will 
the Emmanuel movement prove permanent? 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE GOSPEL WORKING FOR KINGDOM EXPANSION 

No man believes in the gospel of Jesus Christ who 
believes in it for himself alone. Neither does any 
man believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ who be- 
lieves in it for his own city or county or country 
alone. The gospel that a man holds, is for the 
world, or else it is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

It is true that a man may have the missionary 
spirit and not have the gospel of Jesus Christ, or 
have it, if at all, in a very imperfect form. The 
religion of Mohammed is a missionary faith, but it 
is very far from the faith of Jesus. There are few 
stories which are at once so heroic and so pathetic 
as Francis Parkman's history of " The Jesuits in 
North America." What did they not endure of 
danger and hardship and suffering and cruel 
martyrdom? And this oftentimes for the pitiful 
purpose of squeezing a few drops of water out of a 
wet handkerchief surreptitiously on to the fever- 
heated brow of a dying child, not to cool its brow, 
but to save its soul. Their zeal and its immediate 
objective is in curious contrast with the missionary 
indifference of much modern liberalism. 

Why should a man who believes in salvation 
86 



The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 87 

through sacrament or through ecclesiastical con- 
nection be so much more in earnest for the salvation 
of his fellows than the man who thinks larger 
thoughts of God? Why did the very Pharisees 
whom Jesus scored so unmercifully for their shal- 
low, selfish faith, " compass sea and land to make 
one proselyte " with the ordinary result of such 
unethical enthusiasm that they made him "twofold 
more the child of hell " than themselves, when so 
many to-day who hold the Christian faith in more 
than ordinary purity are singularly indifferent to 
any active propaganda of their principles? 

It is well to remember the strong saying of the 
first great missionary of Christianity, to the effect 
that neither the faith that can remove mountains 
nor the zeal by which a man gives his body to be 
burned, is of any large consequence without love. 
Yet, it is perplexing that faith and zeal should so 
often inspire men and women to greater effort and 
self-sacrifice than love itself. Or is this only ap- 
parently so? 

Whatever the explanation of this problem, it is 
certain that the love wherewith Jesus himself loved 
the world, inspired in him the utmost of zeal to 
give his doctrine to the world. He was far removed 
from the petty proselytizing spirit of the Pharisees, 
but he was also far removed from the indolent indif- 
ference of a self-complacent Christianity. His one 
passion was the kingdom of God, and the one su- 
preme end of all his ministry was to make that king- 



88 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

dom known to men. Nothing less than this is ab- 
solutely Christian. So far as any man cares more 
for money-getting, or any other kind of getting 
more than he cares about getting men into the king- 
dom of God, and getting the kingdom of God into 
men, he is out of harmony with Christ. If his doc- 
trine interferes with the dissemination of the gos- 
pel of the kingdom, it is to that extent, at least, 
out of harmony with the doctrine of Jesus. And, if 
he has less zeal than men who have a less intelligent 
faith, there is something seriously the matter with 
his faith, however superficially intelligent it may 
appear. A faith that is not a missionary faith, 
whatever excellencies it may have, lacks a good deal 
of being the faith of Jesus. 

The early church was a missionary church. In- 
deed, the church has always been a missionary 
church when it has been in actual touch with the 
spirit of Jesus. The Reformation church was a 
missionary church. So also were the churches 
which Methodism kindled into something like 
apostolic life. Whenever the spirit of Jesus has 
worked outside of the churches in some great en- 
thusiasm for humanity, as in the movement for the 
overthrow of human slavery, missionary zeal and 
self-sacrifice have always been manifest. False 
faiths and false enthusiasms also have their mis- 
sionary zeal, it is true, as weeds have their upspring- 
ing and self-asserting qualities. But a true faith 
and hope can no more be without missionary en- 



The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 89, 

thusiasm and prosper in a world where falsehood 
is to be found on every hand, than one may expect 
a profitable harvest from a plant which is with- 
out self-assertive qualities. However excellent the 
plant may be in other respects, it will utterly fail in 
the struggle for existence with more aggressive 
and assertive forms of life. So has every church 
failed and every movement which has not had in it 
much of the missionary spirit. 

Jesus affirmed in many forms the expansive char- 
acter of his kingdom. It was to be like the mustard 
seed in the contrast between its humble and ap- 
parently insignificant beginnings and its later large 
and impressive growth. It was to be like the leaven 
which a woman took and hid in three measures of 
meal, a very large quantity of flour from the stand- 
point of individual need, or even the need of the 
ordinary family, and by and by the whole was 
leavened. The Great Commission is a commission 
to evangelize the whole earth. The more clearly 
the character of Jesus' teaching is understood 
the more does one perceive the truly universal 
application of his doctrine and the imperative 
mood in which it stands toward all human- 
kind. To deny it to any part of the world is to 
deny the very heart of the message itself, and no 
man who really knows what the gospel is can fail 
to feel its inevitably universal appeal. The strange 
thing is not that every Christian church which has 
any claim to the Christian name is more or less 



90 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

missionary in its outlook and activities. Much 
stranger is it that any such church can think itself 
alive at all if it does not throb through and through 
with the passion to give its gospel to the whole 
earth as rapidly and as compellingly as it is pos- 
sible to send forth the word. There is more excuse 
for the military missionism of Mohammedanism 
than there is for the dead indifference of many a so- 
called Christian church. Better a pagan who thinks 
he has something worth while for the world and 
is mad with zeal to give it to the whole earth than 
a " Christian " who claims a faith which is for all 
ages and all nations, and is too absorbed in himself 
and his own narrow environment to make any at- 
tempt to tell the world his good news. Either he 
does not believe that his " good news " is good for 
much, or else he is not good for much himself. 

The democracy of Jesus means more than the 
leveling up of classes to the one vast fellowship of 
the sons and daughters of God where there can be 
no high and no low. It means also, and quite as 
imperiously, the passing of all provincialism and 
lesser patriotism into the highest patriotism of all, 
the final fellowship of humankind, the universal 
household of the kingdom of God. The kingdom 
of heaven cannot be less expansive than this and 
be the kingdom of heaven indeed. And no man is 
in the kingdom of heaven very far who does not 
long and pray and work for the day when every 
other man shall be also there. 



The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 91 

Fortunately ours is a missionary age. We have 
the opportunity for missionary effort as never in 
the history of the world before. When William 
Carey looked up from his cobbler's bench at the 
map of the world, a little more than a century ago, 
not only were the doors of many nations closed 
to any would-be missionary of the cross, but the 
material means of giving that gospel were nothing 
like as adequate as they are to-day. Carey had the 
printing press indeed, though printing itself was 
crude and clumsy enough when compared with the 
processes of publication to-day. And the railroad, 
the telegraph, the telephone, and a hundred other 
devices which have to do more or less directly with 
intercommunication between men and nations, were 
yet to come. If all this improvement in the material 
instruments of communication does not make for 
greater interest in telling to the earth the story of 
Jesus Christ and his message to men, it can only 
be that we do not think that story and that message 
actually worth while. The young Christian who can 
read even the " Scientific American " and not arise 
from it with enlarged missionary interest and en- 
thusiasm, has not yet learned to make the kingdom 
of God first in his thoughts. 

Neither does any man or woman appreciate the 
age in which we live in an economic way who does 
not recognize the missionary appeal. It is no mere 
coincidence that modern machinery and modern 
missions were born in the same country and about 



92 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

the same time. The expansion of material produc- 
tion was bound to break down the barriers between 
nations, and necessitate foreign markets as wide as 
the world. Commerce would have been clogged 
long ago but for these new channels for the wider 
distribution of goods. Had these channels been 
opened without reference to religion, they must 
have been very much narrower and shallower, and 
the results must have been mischievous beyond 
measure, both to the heathen and the Christian 
world. They would have been narrower and shal- 
lower because the needs of men who are barbarian 
are nothing like as broad and deep as the needs of 
men who are Christian. The man whom Jesus 
healed was seen sitting " clothed and in his right 
mind." There is a close connection between a right 
mind and the demand for clothing and all the other 
good things which make for civilization. And had 
the missionaries of commerce been able to create 
some crude demand for their manufactures without 
the missionaries of the cross to go before them, 
the result to heathendom and civilization may be 
measured in a way by the appalling conditions 
which prevailed in some of the islands of the seas 
where foreign seamen added the vices of civilization 
to the ignorance and lawlessness of untutored peo- 
ples. The world would have been overwhelmed 
with a lava flow of iniquity which one hesitates to 
more than suggest. 

Fortunately the missionary was first. The true 



The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 93 

" advance agent of prosperity," as many of our 
big business men are coming to recognize, is the 
man who makes men out of barbarians by showing 
them the way into life. Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
says somewhere: 

" We must be here to work, 
And he who works can only work for men, 
And not to work in vain must understand hu- 
manity 
And so work humanly, and raise men's bodies 
Still by raising souls, as God did first." 

This indeed is always the divine method, to 
" raise men's bodies still by raising souls." And 
this is missions. City missions, home missions, for- 
eign missions, they are all absolutely in line with 
good business sense. The young business man who 
does not see this needs a course in elementary 
economics. Whenever you raise men's bodies, as 
you always do when you actually raise their souls, 
you do at the same time raise the demand for all 
legitimate goods. " The stars in their courses 
fought against Sisera," and all the stars of our 
economic world are fighting against provincialism 
and against barbarism and against heathenism, and 
for the coming of that kingdom of God which, if 
it be not " meat and drink " is, nevertheless, on the 
side of " more abundant life," even in the things 
which commerce supplies. 



94 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

Missionary interest is both common-sense religion 
and common sense in business. It is real Christi- 
anity, and it is real modern enterprise. We shall 
neither hold our own in faith nor in commerce if 
we do not give the gospel to those who are un- 
evangelized. The gospel works inevitably toward 
kingdom expansion. All the commercial forces of 
the day are working also toward the larger life of 
men, which is the ultimate of Christian faith. The 
first impulse of the new convert, to tell his faith 
abroad, is central in all living Christian faith. If 
we have gained in understanding of the gospel, 
we shall have gained also in the desire to make it 
known, for the more one knows the gospel the 
more he sees how naturally and needfully it belongs 
to all mankind. Likewise every gain in the demo- 
cratic spirit makes for missionary interest, since 
it includes all humanity in a large, loving human 
sympathy which will not be content with anything 
less than the best for all our fellows. Modern busi- 
ness also is emphatically on the side of missions 
when it is broadly and intelligently viewed. The 
young Christian who is enthusiastic for missions 
may, therefore, know that he is but thinking Christ's 
gospel in the terms of Jesus' own thinking, and is 
one with the profoundest and mightiest movements 
of our time, the expansion of business, the expan- 
sion of the democratic spirit, and the expansion of 
real religion in the world. Moreover, he can 
justify his interest in missions by the miracles 



The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 95 

which the missionary spirit has worked and is 
working in modern times. 

Quiz 

1. How do you explain the missionary zeal of 
many whose gospel message is most imperfect? 2. 
Is a selfish or self-complacent indifference to mis- 
sionary activity less mischievous than a blind and 
intolerant sectarianism? 3. What is the economic 
importance of missions ? 4. Does religion pay from 
the standpoint of general commercial consideration? 
5. What are the missionary motives which modern 
conditions emphasize? 

Topics for Further Study 

1. Is there any close connection between the in- 
vention of machinery and the modern missionary 
movement? 2. Has biblical criticism weakened the 
missionary impulse? 3. Is the material or the 
moral first in the quickening of nations? 4. Is the 
enlargement of missionary benevolence dependent 
in any marked degree upon the correction of our 
present missionary methods? 



CHAPTER IX 

THE GOSPEL'S MODERN MIRACLES 

In the " Missionary Review of the World " for 
January, 1897, there is a brief article under the cap- 
tion, " A Mighty Miracle." It is the story of a wo- 
man evangelist in India, Miss Stevens, " Evangel- 
ist Elizabeth," and a heathen priest in the vicinity 
of Madras, to whom she gave certain of her tracts, 
after she had prayed in his presence for the blessing 
of God upon them. He was decked out in all his 
horrid priestly gear, and was inwardly furnished 
with all manner of clever argument against the 
gospel, having the reputation of being one of the 
ablest dialecticians in that part of India. He had 
himself posed before the people as a god, and had 
received homage as such. The tracts had apparently 
only an ill effect upon him, for a few days after- 
ward he poured out his abuse upon a native worker 
because of them. The preacher answered him never 
a word, but read to him the first chapter of John, 
and then, kneeling, wrestled in prayer for him. 
Not long afterward Miss Stevens was astonished 
to see this same priest standing in her own room, 
and to hear him say, " Jesus has conquered me." 
He asked baptism, but was advised to consider care- 
96 



The Gospel's Modern Miracles 97 

fully what the step meant to him. Nevertheless he 
returned, and in such childlike spirit proffered his 
request again that he was received, the signs of his 
pagan priesthood were removed, and he became al- 
most immediately an effective preacher of the gos- 
pel which he had despised and opposed. 

" O Galilean, thou hast conquered," are the 
words attributed to the apostate emperor Julian, 
when his effort to stay the Christian conquest of the 
Roman Empire proved futile. This ancient con- 
quest of Rome by the early church has been cited 
often as one of the miracles of the ages, a kind of 
crowning demonstration of the supernatural origin 
of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet, in our own day, 
the conquest of heathen nations and peoples by this 
same gospel has been a no less divine demonstration 
of the presence and power of God in and through 
the gospel of Christ. The Hindu priest's confession, 
" Jesus has conquered me," is worthy to be written 
side by side with the more famous saying of the 
unhappy emperor, and there is every reason to be- 
lieve that the Christian conquest of India and heath- 
enism generally will be reckoned by the ages to 
come as no less miraculous than the successes of 
the gospel in the earliest centuries of missionary 
endeavor. 

The miracles of missions are by no means all the 
miracles of our faith. There are miracles of healing 
in the name of Christ in these modern days which 
will compare favorably with those recorded in any 

G 



98 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

century since the Son of man himself " went about 
doing good." Many of these miracles are wrought 
by the physicians themselves, and with the use of 
the latest scientific appliances. We do the gospel 
of Christ injustice when we exclude from the works 
of Jesus all the indirect ministry of his spirit 
whereby Christian nations have been quickened into 
the better understanding of the laws of God in the 
realm of the physical and have learned to co-oper- 
ate more effectively with him. All that is best in 
modern civilization belongs, in a large way, to 
those " greater works than these " which Christ 
promised that his disciples should do. But mis- 
sions, at home and abroad, are a kind of first fruits 
everywhere of the marvelous working of the spirit 
of Christ among men. 

Yet the miracles of missions are by no means 
confined to the conversion of the heathen abroad 
and the outcast at home. In many respects the 
missionaries themselves are the supreme miracle of 
modern missions. Not since the days of the apostles 
has there been a greater galaxy of splendid names 
than the story of modern missions affords. The 
missionary activity of the church, quite apart from 
its direct results in the saving of those to whom the 
gospel has been preached, has justified its cost many 
fold by its priceless product of heroic men and 
women who have written their names with the 
heroes of faith whom the writer of the Hebrews so 
inspiringly enumerates. 



The Gospel's Modem Miracles 99 

The young Christian who does not know some- 
thing of William Carey and Adoniram Judson, of 
Robert Morrison and Alexander Duff, of Robert 
Moffat and David Livingstone, and John Williams 
and Bishop Patton, and a host of others before and 
after them, " of whom the world was not worthy," 
is almost as unpardonable as an aspirant for Ameri- 
can military promotion who had never heard of 
Hannibal and Alexander, of Caesar and Charle- 
magne, of Napoleon and Wellington, or of Wash- 
ington, General Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant. 
These men themselves, last named, are the study 
of every man who counts himself a soldier and seeks 
success in arms. How shall our Christian youth 
excuse themselves for their scant acquaintance with 
even the names of those whose character and career 
is such a mighty demonstration of the greater good 
and more enduring glory of the warfare in which 
the followers of the Prince of Peace are engaged? 

One need not go away from home for that matter 
to find these modern miracles in the missionaries 
themselves. Christianity has never done anything 
greater in its way than the raising of Jerry Mc- 
Cauley from the dead. This derelict of the New 
York slums was more hopeless, if possible, than the 
heathen priest or any heathen outcast. Yet the 
work of the gospel in him gave the world a Chris- 
tian hero worthy to be compared for self-sacrificing 
devotion and utmost love for the fallen among his 
fellows with the greatest of the apostles of ancient 



ioo The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

days. Here was a Christian athlete and wrestler 
with whose record of immortal achievement in him- 
self and for others every man who aspires to 
spiritual stature and strength ought to be thor- 
oughly familiar. Nevertheless, Jerry McCauley was 
no more of a miracle than was Dwight L. Moody, 
though Moody came not from the slums. The 
Northfield lad who, without an education, came 
forth from that farmhouse in northern Massachu- 
setts to electrify the world with the power of a 
Christ-inspired personality and made of his mustard- 
seed beginnings such a mighty tree of righteousness 
was a veritable apostle to our times. And Mc- 
Cauley and Moody are but two of a multitude of 
men and women whose being and doing in the spirit 
of Christ make modern Christian biography such a 
rich field of holy inspiration. Cornelia, the mother 
of the Gracchi, is said to have boasted of her boys, 
" These are my jewels." With much more justi- 
fication may the church of modern days point to 
her sons of strength who are shaping the empire 
which shall never pass away and say of them, both 
for what they are and for what they have done, 
" These are my miracles." 

The miracles of missions are manifest, not only 
in the missionaries themselves and in their works, 
but quite as wonderfully in the churches at home. 
The best answer to any Baptist objector to foreign 
missions is the Baptist denomination. One need 
not exaggerate the weakness of our denomination 



The Gospel's Modern Miracles 101 

before Judson came to us out of the bosom of New 
England Congregationalism, nor the relatively- 
feeble growth of that wing of our denomination 
which rejected the call of God in Judson's appeal, 
to prove beyond peradventure of doubt that great 
as have been the achievements of Baptist mission- 
aries on the foreign field, the heathen have done 
more for us than we have done for them. Or, if 
you like the statement better, the reflex influence of 
foreign missionary effort has been worth more to 
the churches at home than all the cost of it abroad. 
Our own denominational growth, since we heard 
and heeded the call from the Macedonia of heathen- 
ism, is one of the most marvelous results among all 
the marvels of missions. How any Baptist, young 
or old, can be indifferent to foreign missions in 
the face of this practical demonstration of the 
splendid dividends which we as a denomination have 
received from our reluctant investment in this for- 
ward march of the faith passes all understanding. 
Yet, when have miracles ever convinced men against 
their own captious and covetous moods? 

This is not a book upon missions, and I do not 
propose to fill even this chapter with the vain attempt 
to catalogue the conquests of modern missionary ad- 
vance. The literature of missions is abundant, and 
most accessible, and there is needed for an intelligent 
appreciation of the strength and success of missions 
only the willing mind and a fair degree of appli- 
cation. What the writer of the fourth Gospel says 



102 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

of the miracles of Jesus himself is exceedingly 
apropos with reference to the miracles wrought in 
his name on the mission fields at home and abroad: 
" If they should be written, every one, I suppose 
that even the world itself could not contain the 
books that should be written." But what is writ- 
ten and what may easily be read by any young 
Christian who will give a very moderate amount 
of time and attention to these modern miracles, is 
enough to prove again that " Jesus is the Christ," 
and that believing in him men may still find " life 
through his name." 

Read what God has wrought in Africa since the 
days of Moffat and of Livingstone there. Florence 
Nightingale, herself one of the finest products of 
the last century, whose sun still lingers in our own, 
said of David Livingstone, that he was the greatest 
man of the nineteenth century, that century of al- 
most countless mighty men. Read his story till the 
spirit of that Christlike life flows through all the 
channels of your own. Then read the latest words 
of Theodore Roosevelt concerning what missions 
have done and are doing in the once " dark con- 
tinent " where the glow of the morning of a Chris- 
tian faith and life now touches even the long- 
sought sources of the Nile. 

Or read the story of China and Japan, and con- 
sider the miracle of Nippon, and the slower but 
hardly less marvelous awaking of the vast " Celes- 
tial Empire." Those who watched beside the sea 



The Gospel's Modem Miracles 103 

> ' 

the feeding of the five thousand with that handful 
of bread and fish, long ago, saw a sight less marvel- 
ous than the refreshing of millions upon millions of 
men and women, and the renewal of a whole nation 
of nations through the apparently puerile efforts 
of Robert Morrison and his coadjutors and succes- 
sors in China. When Morrison was about to sail 
for China, and was settling the matter of fare and 
freight with a " practical " shipowner, the man of 
business said to the Christian argonaut, who seemed 
to him to be going out after a visionary " golden 
fleece," " Now, Mr. Morrison, do you really expect 
that you will make an impression on the idolatry 
of the Chinese Empire ? " And Morrison answered 
the smile which thinly veiled the practical man's 
contempt with a dignified severity becoming one of 
the prophets of Israel, " No, sir ; but I expect that 
God will." Nor was the missionary's expectation in 
vain as concerns even his own years. Morrison, in 
a measure, " lived to see of the fruit of his soul, and 
was satisfied." 

In no irreverent spirit may it be said, but with 
utmost acknowledgment, that it is the work of 
Christ himself, and not our own, that greater than 
the works which he did when he walked upon the 
sea or stilled the storm-tossed waters of Galilee 
have been the works of the missionaries of the cross 
in the far stormier and more uncertain islands of the 
Pacific. John Williams' " Narratives of Missionary 
Enterprise " have been compared by an eminent 



104 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

prelate to " The Acts of the Apostles." The mar- 
tyrdom of Williams in the New Hebrides recalls, 
indeed, the martyrdom of Stephen, and the success 
of the gospel in the south seas is as thrilling as the 
story of Pentecost. 

And what shall be said of the marvels of mission- 
ary success which have crowned the long waiting 
and unwearied labors of our own missionaries 
among the Telugus? Or what of Mackay and 
Uganda? Or what of the McAll Mission in 
France? Or what of the transformation which is 
going on in the Philippines, more marvelous than 
when the Master himself " manifested his glory " at 
Cana in Galilee by turning the water into wine? 
Is not the whole story of missionary effort one long 
enlargement of this miracle, the Lord of Life turn- 
ing the water of our weak endeavor into the satis- 
fying draught which is making the whole earth 
jubilant with his joy? 

The miracle goes on every day under our very 
eyes, and we are wondrous slow to see it and quick 
to forget. The apostles of Jesus themselves saw 
less of the mighty power of the gospel than our 
own generation is beholding. The modern world 
is one vast arena of Christian effort, a thousand- 
fold more expansive than the arena at Rome where 
weak women confounded the power of the Caesars 
with their overcoming testimony for the Christ. 
And again men and women, even young men and 
maidens, are wrestling with the wild beasts and 



The Gospel's Modern Miracles 105 

wilder men, and are overturning nations with their 
message of the undying Christ. We need not look 
back across the centuries for our help and inspi- 
ration. The inspiration is here. We need not argue 
about the miracles of the past. The present miracle 
is its own witness. It is in our own land, and 
ought veritably to be a part of our own life. 

Quiz 

1. Can the word miracle be fairly used of any 
modern manifestation of the power of the gospel? 
2. Are the works of modern engineers and other 
wizards of the material realm in any sense wonders 
of the gospel? 3. What is the first miracle of mis- 
sions? 4. Are Baptists indebted to missions in any 
unusual degree; and, if so, where do you find the 
evidence of it? 5. Are we actually doing greater 
works to-day than Jesus did while here; and if so 
how do you account for it? 6. How can we make 
the miracles of missions a part of our own life ? 

Topics for Further Study 

i. Who was Robert Moffat, and what were his 
relations with David Livingstone? 2. What part 
may be fairly claimed for missions as the awakener 
of Japan? 3. Will the Eastern nations, as they be- 
come more Christian, modify the forms of our 
Western Christianity? 4. If so, what type of heresy 
or what lines of influence may we most reasonably 



io6 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

expect? 5. Have missions produced as yet any 
characters among the heathen themselves of really 
heroic size? 6. Is the pursuit of foreign markets 
making for the Christianizing of the world? 7. 
Who is your favorite missionary hero, and why? 



CHAPTER X 

THE GOSPEL AND BUSINESS 

There are two words in very common use to-day 
which nowhere appear in the Bible. These words 
are, employer and employee. Very much of the 
problem of Christian living centers about these 
words to-day. They at least suggest the wide dif- 
ference between the " business " of the Bible and 
the " business " of our time. 

In the Roman world of Jesus 5 day, one-half of 
the people or more were slaves. Our word " serv- 
ant " is the old Roman word for slave, hardly 
changed at all as to form. Paul, signing himself " a 
servant of Jesus Christ," was, in fact, designating 
himself as a slave. He returned the slave Onesimus 
to his master, Philemon; but, as he had bowed 
himself to the lowliness of a slave in relation to 
Christ, in the same relationship he lifts Onesimus 
to the dignity of a brother in the Lord. Though 
not in form the denial of slavery, the whole bear- 
ing of Paul in this matter was fundamentally con- 
trary to any and all kinds of selfish commercialism 
between man and man. 

In some quarters there is much talk of " wage- 
slavery " to-day. The ancient slave was, in some 

107 



108 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

respects, undoubtedly better off on the side of com- 
fort and security than the less fortunate of modern 
industrial workers. He was not in constant dread 
of losing his job, the nightmare of a multitude of 
laborers to-day, and not always laborers of the 
poorer class alone. He had no such fear of the age 
limit, as prevails widely among the workmen of this 
present strenuous period of keenest industrial com- 
petition. And very frequently he was better housed 
and clothed and fed than is the laborer of the city 
now. The modern workman has this advantage, 
sometimes a dubious advantage enough as it works 
out in practical life, that he is technically his own 
master. In a great multitude of cases, it means 
little more than that he is compelled to shift for 
himself when his profitableness to his employer has 
passed, or some cheaper kind of labor, human or 
mechanical, is found to take his place and grind 
out greater dividends. He is not a workman, in the 
sense of the craftsman periods, of skilled individual 
labor, nor yet a slave in the sense that he is any 
man's property to be cared for, with at least the hu- 
manity with which an average man will care for the 
horse or dog that is spent and outworn. He is 
merely a " hand," which is in some ways the most 
terrible term that was ever used to designate the 
common soldier in the fearful battle for bread. 

If modern industrialism has made the status of 
a multitude of workmen so hard that they are in 
a position of very doubtful advantage when com- 



The Gospel and Business 109 

pared with the better class of slaves in ancient 
times, it has made even more difficult, if pos- 
sible, the position of many a modern employer. 
If the Christian life is next to impossible in the 
sweatshop and the factories where unrestrained 
greed controls, it is not less difficult in the offices 
and " counting rooms " where the toll of such toil 
is taken. Imagine a race between two ancient gal- 
leys, driven each by its quota of whiplashed galley 
slaves ! It would be hard enough for the driven 
slaves, under such circumstances, to keep a Chris- 
tian spirit with the cords ever and anon biting their 
all but broken backs. It would be harder still for 
the man who wielded the whip to maintain anything 
approaching personal fellowship with Jesus Christ 
without throwing down his whip and leaving the 
ship. And to attempt this might mean a seat for 
himself on the oarsmen's bench with the slaves, 
and a worse master with the whip in hand over 
both him and them. 

Grant that this illustration is severe, and does not 
fairly represent average industrial conditions in our 
modern world it is nevertheless but a heavily out- 
lined picture of what prevails in many quarters — 
employee and employer both alike driven by the 
harsh necessities of business into a situation where 
real Christian living is tremendously and tragically 
difficult for both. Whatever the difficulties of 
work on the foreign field, and however great the 
call for heroism there, the difficulties of Christian 



no The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

living at home in the heart of the market-place are 
hardly less, and the demand for heroes and martyrs 
in the business world is as great as it is anywhere 
on earth to-day. Neither shall we make business 
Christian nor deliver our brethren from bondage 
often fitly compared to that which Israel suffered in 
Egypt long centuries ago, until we recognize the 
severity of the conditions which do actually prevail 
and hear the voice of the Lord calling us to serve 
our less fortunate fellows at whatever cost to our- 
selves. 

Yet, there is need of great common sense in all of 
this matter. Not the hard " business sense," which 
denies or defends the evils, and will hear nothing of 
any proposals which make less of immediate money 
than of the everlasting rights of man. Such " busi- 
ness sense " is not even good business, as the his- 
tory of every reform movement has proven; much 
less is it the gospel of Jesus Christ. The sense 
that is needed is the sense of patience and kindliness 
and justice to all. Jesus was not on the side of 
" class consciousness," and " class consciousness " is 
an exceedingly dangerous weapon to wield. Those 
who take up that sword are in great peril of perish- 
ing by it. Neither was Jesus on the side of imme- 
diate revolution wherewith to establish the better 
social order. Jesus spoke bravely, and even radic- 
ally, on the side of the poor. His denunciation of 
social injustice was terrific at times. But the inci- 
dent of wealth no more robbed a man of Jesus' 



The Gospel and Business 



sympathy than did the incident of poverty. He had 
as little use for the covetousness of the " have 
nots " as for the covetousness of the " haves." He 
did not measure materialism by the size of its ac- 
cidental and objective desire, but rather by the 
weight of its moral displacement in the soul of the 
man himself. The sense that we need is not the 
sense of material values, which tends, on the one 
side, to a riotous covetousness, and on the other 
side to an equally and possibly more dangerous re- 
pressive covetousness. The sense that we need is 
spiritual sense, the sense of life's larger values and 
man's deepest relations to the world about him and 
to his fellows. This is as far removed from the cold 
calculations of the mere moneymaker on the one 
hand, and the time-serving timidity of all those who 
think first of " vested interests," as it is from the 
ravenous rancor of the appetite-driven throng. It 
is the sense of God first of all, and in the best mean- 
ing of the words it is also " the sense of man." 
This is the preeminent need of every man who is in 
business to-day, whether he is employer or em- 
ployee. 

Most of current advice to young people who are 
in the midst of business life to-day is too much 
dominated by the philosophy of self-help. There 
is no doubt that this philosophy has had its vic- 
tories, and victories which were worth while. But 
it does not seem to have occurred to many who are 
at pains to tell us that Jesus said nothing concern- 



ii2 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

ing the social issues of his day — a very doubtful 
declaration — that neither did Jesus expatiate on the 
much-lauded economic virtues of our time, industry 
and thrift and enterprise and " getting on in the 
world." I do not remember that he even so much 
as advised any of the young people of his time to 
" get an education." This is not to be taken as im- 
plying any disparagement of education nor of any 
of the virtues mentioned above. It is good that 
every young Christian should get the best educa- 
tion to be had. It is good also that every young 
Christian cultivate the spirit of industry and 
economy and enterprise within the limits of that 
" mind of Christ " which moved him, " though 
rich," yet, " for our sakes," to " become poor." 
But better than any of these things, good as they 
are in their place, and with only a Christian em- 
phasis upon them, is the one great thing which 
Jesus did teach, the seeking " first " of that " king- 
dom of God and his righteousness " which is the 
real business of every Christian life. The passion 
for the kingdom of God, rightly understood, is the 
great need of modern business life. No man can 
be a Christian in business or anywhere else, though 
he may be a much esteemed moralist with a Chris- 
tian name, unless something of the vision and 
passion of the kingdom of God is first in his heart. 
A young woman, who was an applicant for 
church-membership, was asked by her pastor why 
she believed herself a Christian. Her reply, which 



The Gospel and Business 113 

has been much quoted and commended, was this: 
" Because, sir, I sweep under the mats." And then 
she explained that before she became a Christian, 
in her work as a servant, she had slighted her 
sweeping wherever it did not show; but now she 
did it with conscientious thoroughness as "unto 
the Lord." Therefore she swept " under the mats." 
It was a good answer, and reminds one of the 
famous and familiar verse by the devout George 
Herbert : 

" A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine; 
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
Makes that an th' action fine." 

The Christian spirit certainly works for faithful- 
ness, and thoroughness, and conscientiousness, and 
all the finer individual characteristics. But it does 
not end here. The Christian in business will be more 
than industrious and thorough, and as capable as it 
is in him to be at his own particular task whether 
he would prefer that task or not. He ought not 
to be satisfied with any lower ideal of individual 
excellence nor to excuse himself on any plea for 
being a second-rate workman as compared with the 
man of the world. And he ought not to be satis- 
fied with this individual excellence alone. He is 
in business to seek " first " the kingdom of God, and 
that kingdom cannot be confined to his own soul. 

Henry Havelock made a great success of Chris- 

H 



H4 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

tian living, though he lived it under the radically 
unchristian conditions of militarism. We have had 
other great and good soldiers who have served God 
and man most heroically in the camp and on the 
battlefield; and this, notwithstanding the fact that 
better than all warfare is the war against war. So 
also there are great " captains of industry," and 
common soldiers not a few who are serving Christ 
splendidly in the camps of industry and on the 
sanguinary fields of fiercest commercial competi- 
tion. It is a limited and qualified service in the one 
case as in the other, but that it is real Christian liv- 
ing can hardly be successfully denied. We are 
coming more and more to appreciate the limited 
character of Christian living in the midst of an 
unchristian economic environment. We need more 
than economic Havelocks to show forth the beauty 
of Christian living in camp and battlefield; we need 
our economic Tolstoys to cry out against the vast 
wickedness of economic war. But we must not 
judge in the one case more harshly than in the 
other, nor deny that even a " Napoleon of finance " 
may have some high qualities, and may, in the 
providence of God serve the ends of that kingdom 
which shall never pass away. 

" Diligent in business " is a very ancient exhorta- 
tion ; but there is still place for it in the armory of 
Christian advice. War is not only passing, but 
even while it lingers here, its conditions are being 
modified by the " Red Cross " and other manifesta- 



The Gospel and Business 115 

tions of the spirit of Christ. We may believe that 
Christ would not approve war, but we cannot keep 
him from the battlefield when men are actually 
there. Neither can we keep him out of the stock 
exchange, nor away from the railroad headquarters, 
or the factory, though these be not to his mind. Let 
us, by all means, work for the " new birth " in the 
business world, when all our industrialism shall be 
converted into a Christlike ministry to men, and 
let us no more despair of this transformation than 
we will of the possible salvation of human indi- 
vidual derelicts like Jerry McCauley, or of religious 
and political institutions apparently more hopeless 
than he. But while we work for this large ideal, 
let us work also every man over against his own 
door and make our own business as Christian as it 
may be under whatever actual conditions we find. 
Let us also " sweep under the mats " and do our 
work as if Christ himself were our employer. Let 
us receive our employee as another Onesimus, even 
though he has not yet found his Paul. Let us be 
" diligent in business," but willing to fail if thereby 
the kingdom of God may the more quickly suc- 
ceed. Despise not the martyrdom which none will 
applaud, and which may be reckoned as only in- 
competence or worse. Nowhere in all heathendom 
to-day is the opportunity for splendid, self-sacrifi- 
cing service greater than it is in the apparently un- 
romantic and unheroic surroundings of ordinary 
business life. And when the roll of martyrs and 



n6 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

mighty servants of God is made up, it will include 
many who were only known as " business men," 
and very ordinary business men from the stand- 
point of their fellows in whom the vision of truth 
and righteousness was dim. The best success that 
any man can have in business is to succeed in keep- 
ing himself clean, and kindly, and high-minded, 
holding fast in the midst of the material his own 
faith in the things that are unseen and eternal, and 
working steadfastly through the yielding of his own 
more immediate and impressive prosperity for the 
growth of commercial conditions which Christ him- 
self would approve. Nothing less than this is busi- 
ness success. 

Quiz 

i. What were the industrial conditions of the 
world in which Jesus had part when upon earth ? 2. 
What is the so-called ''wage slavery" of our day? 
3. What do you understand by the philosophy of 
" self-help " ? 4. How do you explain the silence 
of Jesus concerning industry and thrift and enter- 
prise and education and like individual virtues? 
5. Who was Henry Havelock, and how did he dis- 
tinguish himself? 6. What forms does martyrdom 
take in business life? 

Topics for Further Study 

1. The origin of slavery. 2. The rise of modern 
industrialism, and the special characteristics of the 



The Gospel and Business 117 

" machine age " in industry. 3. The self-help teach- 
ing of Samuel Smiles, and its relation to present- 
day economics. 4. Christian living and military 
life. 5. How much money can a Christian properly 
make? 6. Ideal business men. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE GOSPEL AND RECREATION 

Whether is it easier to-day to live a Christian life 
at work or at play? Certainly it is not easy to 
make one's work always measure up to the high 
standard of Jesus. Many a weary disciple im- 
agines that if he might but change his task, or bet- 
ter yet, be released from all necessity of doing any 
unchosen task for the sake of mere bread and but- 
ter, that Christian living would be much more prac- 
ticable than it is. But if life were one long holiday, 
and we were wholly free to use our time just as we 
would, the average of Christian living would prob- 
ably fall rather than rise. 

If there is any need to prove this, the lives of 
the " leisure class " afford abundant proof. Here 
and there one is found living for high ideals and 
for his fellows in some truly worthy way, but in the 
main those who have nothing to do are doing 
nothing that is very much worth while. They do 
not seem to find their much desired freedom a 
stimulus to lives of devotion. Nor may we think 
from the way in which most of us spend our brief 
play periods that playing more and working less 
would make us better Christians than we are. 
118 



The Gospel and Recreation 119 

The little fellow who sat at the table with us 
was just learning to talk. One of his favorite 
words, expressive of a great deal of human nature, 
was, " More, more ! " He seldom said this with re- 
spect to the mush or any other such prosaic dish. 
But he used the word vociferously with respect to 
the doughnuts, to the considerable embarrassment 
of his mother, who was afraid of more serious em- 
barrassment for him. 

Few of us are crying for more work, but a great 
many of us are crying for more play, with little 
more wisdom than the child. Even the churches 
are compelled to make much of entertainment, and 
the chief attraction of the young people's movement 
to many is the " doughnuts " in prospect, of which 
they never seem to have enough. There is a good 
deal of spiritual indigestion on the part of those 
who are very young in Christian living, because 
they will have little of plain, substantial, blood and 
muscle making food, and will insist upon the cake 
and candy and condiments of " fun " and much mis- 
called " recreation." 

Nothing is recreation which does not recreate. 
Some of our play does this, and is, therefore, good 
for us, and not to be condemned. A sense of humor 
is almost indispensable to a well-balanced character. 
The man who cannot enjoy a laugh has not yet 
entered into life. Play is an instinctive exercise of 
youth, and as we have discovered in these modern 
days, has an important physiological bearing upon 



120 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

health and growth. Of play of the right kind we 
have hardly yet enough, despite the exaggerated 
emphasis upon some aspects of the play life. The 
churches have made too much of entertainment and 
too much of certain states of more or less abnormal 
excitement, but they have seldom made enough of 
all-around wholesome enjoyment. Goodness and 
gladness have much more than an alliterative af- 
finity for each other. " Restore unto me the joy 
of thy salvation, . . then will I teach transgressors 
thy ways " was the prayer of a man who judged 
rightly that spiritual life and health and spiritual 
usefulness are also related to joy and play. 

The artists are largely responsible for our over- 
emphasis upon the melancholy of Jesus. He was 
undoubtedly " a man of sorrows, and acquainted 
with grief," but this might also be said of some of 
our modern humorists who have ministered of 
mirth to others while walking in a Gethsemane. 
Jesus was not a humorist. Neither does he make 
the use that Paul made of the games and sports of 
his time to illustrate Christian activity and excel- 
lence. Certainly there was no slightest touch of 
frivolity in him, and on the surface of the records 
there is little appearance of play. But the fact that 
his father and mother could go a day's journey 
without missing him, so as to be at all concerned 
about him, supposing him to be somewhere in the 
caravan, indicates that as a boy of twelve he was 
no unnatural prig, but a healthy, hearty, happy 



The Gospel and Recreation 



child. And the further fact that they sought him 
for three days before it seems to have occurred 
to them to look for him in the temple, together with 
his own mature insistence upon the naturalness of 
his whole attitude toward his Father in heaven, 
speaks also for a lad who was wholly and most joy- 
fully alive. There are traces of keenest humor here 
and there in his teaching, as when he exaggerated 
concerning the " beam " in the critic's own eye. 
Much of his argument against the Pharisees was 
ridicule, cutting indeed, but more mirth-provoking 
by far to his contemporaries than it appears to us. 
And in his great eulogy of John the Baptist, the 
apostle of seriousness in religion, Jesus refers to 
the play of the children in the streets, playing 
funeral and playing weddings, and compares him- 
self and his ministry to the martial procession with 
its dance and song. Indeed, his enemies called 
him, according to his own confession, " a wine- 
bibber and a glutton," as compared with the ab- 
stemious recluse who shunned the social and festive 
board. Jesus was not only very much a man among 
men, but there is every reason to believe that " noth- 
ing that is human " was " foreign " to him. And 
mirth and play belong to normal and healthy life. 
Christians have just as much right to all manner 
of reasonable and helpful recreation as other men. 
That they may forego their rights in the interests 
of a Christian expediency with regard to their own 
peculiar opportunities and responsibilities to others 



122 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

is also true, and a truth of very great consequence, 
requiring much Christian common sense to apply. 
But nothing is wrong in and of itself for a Chris- 
tian which is not also wrong for others. Church- 
membership and Christian profession do not create 
a special moral code. Every man, whether he con- 
fesses faith in Christ or not, or whether he denies 
or affirms Christian obligation is, as a matter of 
fact, bound to acknowledge God's first claim upon 
his life. It is mischievous to admit even by impli- 
cation that a man can escape his responsibility to 
be all that he can be for himself and the world. 
Every man's life is a stewardship whether he will 
or not. Ignoring the fact does not cancel the obli- 
gation, or make less serious his failure to live up 
to his opportunity. No man has any more right to 
throw himself away than has any other man. Every 
man will be held responsible for all that he might 
have been and done in and for the kingdom of God. 
" I would like to join the church, and I know 
I ought to live a Christian life, but I dearly love to 
dance, and I do not think that a Christian ought to 
dance," said a young woman to me some years ago. 
I had not raised the question of dancing at all, and 
had no desire to do so. Get a man or woman right 
on fundamentals and incidentals will take care of 
themselves. We have made and do make alto- 
gether too much of dancing, and card-playing, and 
theatergoing, and all that kind of incidental in so 
far as we have allowed these things to obscure the 



The Gospel and Recreation 123 

real issue, the question of questions, the conscious 
dedication of a man's heart and life to God as the 
one thing without which everything else is vain. 
The fact is that feeling as she did that dancing was 
contrary to the highest type of living, that young 
woman had no more right to dance outside of the 
church than in it. She was bound, as every other 
woman is bound, to act up to her best vision of 
achievement for herself and usefulness toward 
others. I am not saying that dancing is wrong. 
Neither am I saying that it is right. I refuse to 
be side-tracked from the main issue. The fact is 
that you belong to God. All that you are, and all 
that you can do is his, for his kingdom. Your own 
happiness is bound up with this divine intention in 
you and for you. To defeat it is to defeat yourself. 
To trifle with it is to trifle with yourself. God 
wants nothing of you but what is best for you. 
Whatever is consistent with this is yours, and no 
church can take it away from you. Neither can 
anybody give you what is not yours, what is con- 
trary to your whole being's aim and end. It is just 
as wrong for me to eat poison whether I am a mem- 
ber of a pure food club or not. The wrong is in the 
injury it does me, and through me the society to 
which I belong. No one has the right of suicide 
in whole or in part, except as he lays down his life 
for the world. Neither has any one the right of 
moral suicide, either to the extent of refusing moral 
obligation and service altogether or of refusing it 



124 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

with reference to any act or feature of his life. A 
man has no more right to cut his ear off than he 
has to cut his head off. Neither has a man a right 
to cut off one part of his life and mutilate himself 
with reference to the end for which he is alive. 
And that end, whether he knows it and recognizes 
it or not, is to do God's will. 

We shall never settle this question of amusements 
and entertainment by discussing in detail this or 
that petty piece of self-indulgence. We must get 
back to first principles or we shall never get for- 
ward toward perfection. Whatever makes you 
more of a man, or a woman, is right for you, and 
nothing is right which makes you less. The appli- 
cation of this principle you will have to settle for 
yourself. If you settle it dishonestly by any kind 
of subterfuge or evasion, you will suffer the loss 
in yourself. If you exclude anything which you 
might fairly include, you are that much the poorer, 
unless your exclusion has worked some larger gain. 
If you include what in all simplicity and unselfish- 
ness you ought to have excluded, you are as bound 
to pay the price as if you had taken hurtful food 
into your body. God is not whimsical. He works 
through law, and always his law is working, 
whether we wisely work with it or try to get the 
better of it. We never do get " the better " of it, 
but always the worse when we are out of harmony 
with his purposes for us. 

A glass of wine is wrong, not because the man 



The Gospel and Recreation 125 

who drinks it is a church-member or a minister, 
though it may be granted that these considerations 
might enter into the mischievous influence of this 
or that man's indulgence in wine-drinking. But the 
primary evil of it is the mischief it does the man 
himself, and the tendency of the habit to make or 
mar his usefulness toward others. If wrong at 
all it is wrong because indulgence in wine-drinking 
makes a man less a man in relation to the kingdom 
of God. Judged by the same standard a cup of 
coffee may be wrong, though taken at a church so- 
cial; it may lessen a man's value to himself and to 
society. There is a vast amount of very dubious 
devotion to late refreshments in our churches, and 
much harm to clean living and high thinking by 
reason of the animalism which prevails at many a 
religious feast. The churches have a long way to 
go yet to set the world a worthy example of real 
temperance — that is, real self-control with respect 
to appetite. 

The young Christian may permit himself any 
amount of play and any kind of play which con- 
tributes to his manhood. He ought to deny himself 
any sport or " refreshment " or enjoyment which 
makes him less a man. Whatever subtracts from 
his self-respect is wrong for him, however innocent 
it may be in itself. Any indulgence which injures 
his influence for good is too expensive for him, 
though he have a " season ticket " free. With re- 
gard to self-respect, he ought to study for a large 



126 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

view of his own manhood. With regard to his in- 
fluence he ought to study for a large view of the 
manhood of others, their ultimate and not only 
their immediate welfare. In both of these estimates 
he needs to be guided again by first principles, the 
desire to advance the kingdom of God in others 
and not only to win them for this or that institution 
or system of thought, and for himself the determi- 
nation to be a Christlike man, and not merely an ac- 
ceptable church man. Only let his ideal of Christ be 
wholesome and actually Christian, and not a weak, 
modern imitation of some medieval ideal. Then 
may he laugh as heartily as any on occasion, or take 
his place on the athletic field, or join in games 
a-plenty, or indulge with moderation in late refresh- 
ments, or enter into the vacation season with all the 
enthusiasm of the most devoted lover of fishing 
and hunting and the study of nature, with only one 
sensible check to hold his head up lest he stumble, 
the thought that he must be always and everywhere 
a clean and conscientious man, playing and working 
alike, " as in his great Taskmaster's eye/' 

A Christian may do anything, at any time, and 
in any company which will forward the interests of 
the kingdom of God. And those interests are as 
wide as all wholesome life. He may do nothing 
legitimately under any kind of dispensation which 
will harm himself or others. This applies to his 
business as much as to his recreation. It applies to 
his recreation as much as to his business. It is 



The Gospel and Recreation 127 

hard to weep unselfishly, and sorrow like a Christian. 
It is harder yet to laugh always as a Christian 
should. Nowhere to-day is there greater need of 
conscience and common sense than with respect to 
recreation. Much of it is dissipation, and some of 
it is very mischievous dissipation in religious guise. 
None of it is good or right, for the Christian or for 
anybody else, which does not make the world better 
in some way or other, in greater or less degree. 
Go where you please so that you can take the inter- 
ests of the kingdom of God with you, and play as 
you please, so that your play does not undo any of 
the good work of the world. Only remember that 
working or playing we are always His. 

Quiz 

1. Is Christian living more difficult with refer- 
ence to business or recreation to-day ? 2. What can 
be said for humor and play as features of Christian 
character and life ? Is there any evidence of humor 
in Jesus? 3. Is a church-member under more obli- 
gation to live soberly and earnestly than other men 
or women? 4. On what principle shall we deter- 
mine our rights and duties with reference to the so- 
called doubtful amusements? 

Topics for Further Study 

T. Relative religiousness of the leisure class now 
and in former times, is it greater or less, and what 



128 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

are the causes ? 2. The use of the games and sports 
of apostolic times by the Apostle Paul in the illustra- 
tion of Christian truth. 3. The sports of the ancient 
world and modern athletics and amusements from 
the standpoint of the gospel type of life. 4. Has 
the church made too much or too little of absti- 
nence from the theater and the dance? 5. What is 
a Christian attitude toward present-day college ath- 
letics? 6. Is ours a frivolous age? 



CHAPTER XII 

THE GOSPEL AND HOME-MAKING 

Here and there a novelist is found with the courage 
to begin the story where romances in books com- 
monly end, when the proposal is made and the wed- 
ding is fairly in sight. But this is a very daring 
proceeding, indeed, as daring as it is unusual, for 
who will wish to amend the ancient and honorable 
ending of all " good " stories, " and they lived 
happily ever after " ? 

Whether we wish an amendment or not, life 
mocks our sentimental optimism, and insists that 
the wedding is not the climax which the story 
books pretend, but is rather the beginning of love's 
serious narrative. If we thought of marriage more 
as a beginning and less as a finality, it would, 
in a multitude of cases, prove much more final 
than it is. 

The divorce problem is one of the largest prob- 
lems of our day. Much is written concerning it 
that is wise and strong. But there is great need of 
recognizing more that the root of the divorce evil 
is farther back than many of us go. Easy divorce 
comes of easy marriage, and the frequency of di- 
vorce is to a much greater extent than most of us 
i 129 



130 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

admit, the result of false thinking and foolish acting 
with regard to courtship and marriage. 

Men and women will never stay married until 
they get married with more sense than most of 
them show to-day. The wonder is not that divorce 
is common, and that efforts to prevent it in a legal 
way are so often abortive. The much greater 
wonder is that divorce is not vastly more common 
than it is, and that so little of marital misery gets 
aired out in the courts. Not but that there are 
many happy marriages, for undoubtedly there are. 
As Mr. Dooley very shrewdly remarked, " Doin' 
good ain't news." And " bein' good ain't news " 
either. One unhappy marriage will attract more 
public attention than ten happy unions. But that 
there are so many happy unions is much more due 
to the grace of God than it is to the good sense of 
the average young man or young woman who is 
seeking a life companion. And the amount of good 
sense actually shown by the average man and wo- 
man after marriage is out of all proportion to the 
very modest amount commonly exercised before. 
Nearly every man who is happily married will ad- 
mit in his more candid moments that he owes it 
more to the preventing providence of God than he 
does to his own wisdom and judgment. 

Most young people, even Christian young people, 
look upon marriage as a good deal of a joke. 
There is much to encourage this most mischievous 
view in the popular attitude toward married life. 



The Gospel and Home-Making 131 

More jokes are cracked at the expense of marriage 
than on any other theme. Witticism and cynicism 
flourish everywhere in the funny columns of the 
newspapers and in familiar conversation whenever 
courtship and marriage and divorce are to the 
front. Husbands and wives who are sincerely fond 
of each other often cover their real affection by 
cheap cynicisms and insulting witticisms in the 
presence of other people. This whole attitude 
toward marriage is nothing less than wicked, and 
has very much to do with the appalling decadence 
of happy and wholesome family life among us. 
There is no finer field for the exercise of Christian 
good sense and for insistence upon the mind of 
Christ to-day than in the domain of ordinary con- 
versation and conduct with respect to love and mar- 
riage. Every Christian ought to set his face against 
this fatal facetiousness, and ought to do his utmost 
to raise every reference to the marriage relation in 
his presence and all his own thinking concerning it 
to the high level of decency and seriousness and 
reverential regard. For, if there is anything serious 
in this world of ours and anything sacred in human 
relationships, courtship and marriage and family 
life belong to the very innermost court of the 
temple, and ought not to be profaned by the foot- 
ball play of careless feet. I question whether the un- 
clean talk of many men concerning the marriage re- 
lation does as much harm as the cheap witticisms 
and cynical slurs upon marriage which are so com- 



132 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

mon with better people, and the moonshine of senti- 
ment through which the whole matter is viewed by 
the great majority of the youth of our day. 

Apart from direct dedication of one's self to the 
immediate service of the kingdom of God among 
men, home-making is the biggest business in which 
any man and woman can engage. It has more to 
do with individual happiness and ordinarily more to 
do with social usefulness than any other relation 
of life. A prominent railroad manager called the 
attention of a friend who was riding with him to the 
quick whistle of the engine as they passed a certain 
farmhouse standing back from the road. At the 
same time a woman appeared at the door and waved 
her apron above her head. " That is the engineer's 
wife," remarked the railroad manager. " He al- 
ways salutes her when his run brings him past his 
home, and she always returns the salute." And 
then, he added thoughtfully, " I like it. I have 
noticed that a happy home life is back of nearly 
every first-class workman. A man who has a good 
home life is worth more to his employer." 

And though every man who has a good wife may 
well confess that she is " from the Lord," and justly 
attribute much of his fortune to the guiding good- 
ness of God, it is nevertheless true that the exercise 
of good hard common sense brings nowhere surer 
and larger returns than it does when exercised with 
regard to getting and guiding a home. For, in this 
matter, quite as certainly as with respect to any 



The Gospel and Home-Making 133 

work of a man's life, it is preeminently true that 
" God helps those who help themselves." 

Generally speaking, it is better to marry than not 
to marry. The solitary life tends to selfishness, 
unless it is devoted to some large social service, or 
is saved by some exceptional devotion to other 
family relationships. Very seldom should these 
other family relationships be allowed to stand be- 
tween a young man and woman who are wisely 
mated, except in a temporary way. Parents are 
sometimes painfully short-sighted in requiring of 
their children the sacrifice of their own happiness 
and welfare for a less duty at home. I have 
known a father, and a prominent Christian man at 
that, to sacrifice all the future of his daughter for 
the sake of a passing emergency in the home when 
he himself allowed his own desire for a second 
union to set aside his own first responsibilty to the 
younger children of his first wife. There is need 
on all sides of real and rare unselfishness in such 
situations, and neither a young man nor a young 
woman ought to be in such haste to satisfy senti- 
mental impatience as to disregard the reasonable 
demands upon them of the home from which they 
come. But the right to marry and to have a home 
of their own belongs to all young people at a rea- 
sonable age, and there is much self-sacrifice which is 
neither good for those who offer it nor yet for those 
who receive it. The right to live one's own life in 
the world is usually more than a right ; it is a duty, 



134 The Gospel at Work in Modem Life 

and it is too often set aside for some smaller good. 
Even the Master specifically allowed that " for this 
cause," because " it is not good for man to be 
alone " and man and woman were made " in the 
beginning " for each other, " 'for this cause shall a 
man leave his father and mother and cleave to his 
wife." The home instinct is born of God, and ought 
not to be lightly set aside by any man. But it is 
better not to marry than to marry wrong. " Mar- 
riage to a good woman," says the old proverb, " is 
a harbor in the tempest; to a bad woman it is a 
tempest in the harbor." And it is worse, if pos- 
sible, for the woman who is wedded to a bad man, 
for the man unfortunately married spends relatively 
much less time in his " harbor " than the woman 
must needs spend. His home life is much to him, 
but her home life is more to her, and the better 
woman she is, the more it is likely to be. Better a 
parrot and a kitten for her sole companions in old 
age than a lifelong bondage to a fool or a brute in 
the guise of a man. If women were less eager to 
marry, many of them would marry much more 
wisely than they do. 

A man who married twice, and married well in 
both instances, gave this glimpse afterward of his 
heart experience. " I prayed for the wife of my 
youth before I ever met her. Perhaps it was 
visionary from the standpoint of some, but I rea- 
soned it out after this fashion: In our home, al- 
though there was much merriment and frequent 



The Gospel and Home-Making 135 

joking, we were none of us allowed to tell any 
story or make any remark which reflected un- 
favorably upon marriage. Father simply would not 
have it. I grew up with the conviction that mar- 
riage was the right and reasonable thing for every 
normal man, and that it was a matter of utmost 
consequence. One day it came over me that if I 
ever married, the woman I would marry was doubt- 
less alive somewhere, and forming her character, 
as I was forming mine. I was about seventeen, 
but as I had dedicated myself to a considerable 
course of study, and did not mean to marry till that 
course was finished, I had no idea who the woman 
might be. But I remember distinctly carrying the 
matter to God in prayer, as I carried all the affairs 
of my life, and asking that God would bless her 
and have her in his keeping and make me worthy of 
her. I met her a year or two afterward, though it 
was not for years after that we married, but I have 
always felt that the happiness of the twice seven 
years we walked together began with that boyish 
prayer before I so much as knew her name. And 
when she had been in heaven for years, and I chose 
again, I chose with the same sense of a divine fel- 
lowship upon me. I have never done anything in 
my life which I measured more carefully, or which 
was to me in the very act more utterly an act of 
religious devotion than when God called me to 
choose a woman to walk with me and share my 
life." 



136 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

This is not only real religion, but the highest 
sense. A man's wife is either no real wife at all 
or she is the very heart of his heart and the life 
of his life. To choose her carelessly is to invite 
upon himself the greatest disaster which can fall 
upon a man short of the loss of his own character. 
And he will find it no easy matter to keep his char- 
acter if he makes serious mistake as to her's. All 
that a man buys is as nothing to his choice of a 
wife. Better far that he should all his life spend 
his money with his eyes and ears shut than that he 
should choose a wife without the utmost exercise 
of his best sense, and then an earnest prayer for 
the saving grace of God to preserve him against 
himself. And the woman has need of even greater 
caution, for the average woman is better qualified 
to make at least a tolerable wife than is the average 
man to make a decent husband. The average wo- 
man outdares Columbus when she lets loose from 
the moorings of her own home and ventures out 
upon the matrimonial sea. Yet many a girl picks 
out a husband with less caution than she would 
exercise in buying a spring hat. 

A man ought not only to be careful in choosing 
a wife, but he ought to be even more careful to 
make himself worthy of her. It is the height of 
impertinence for any man to ask any woman to 
marry him unless he is all that he might be in 
effort and intention, at least. The colossal conceit 
of many a young man in asking a woman to give 



The Gospel and Home-Making 137 

herself to his care and keeping when he is so wholly 
irresponsible that he is not fit to be trusted with the 
care and keeping of a dog and a wheelbarrow is 
enough to excite the laughter of angels, if it were 
not so much more provocative of tears. Would 
that every young man, before he proposes, might 
read often those rebuking words of Elizabeth Bar- 
rett Browning, speaking for her sex and not for 
herself : 

" Do you know you have asked for the 
costliest thing 
Ever made by the Hand above? 
A woman's heart, and a woman's hand, 
And a woman's wonderful love." 

And all that follows. It might, at least, impress 
him for the moment with the marvelous confidence 
which any man has who takes a woman's life and 
love as his own; a venture, indeed, so daring that 
" fools rush in " where angels might well " fear to 
tread," and where no man should tread who is 
not fit. 

There is no greater victory that the gospel can 
have in modern life than the redemption of the 
home. It is more important because more funda- 
mental than the conquest of politics and business 
and education and literature for Christ. These will 
all follow upon a truly Christian home life, or will 
grow easily and naturally out of the same stem of 
pure purpose and finest self-culture. Nor is the 



138 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 

redemption of the home a matter of marrying at 
this or that age, with this or that amount of money, 
or with so much or so little regard for social lines. 
It is much more than all these matters which must 
be determined severally by careful exercise of the 
best sense with regard to all the circumstances. 

Specific advice here is of little worth, except as it 
applies to specific circumstances, and even then it 
is worth much or little, according to the measure 
of a man's independence of it. If he has not sense 
to make it needless, it is very doubtful whether he 
will have sense to use it. The redemption of home 
life means a larger valuation upon the home and 
home-building first of all, a valuation which will 
manifest itself in the highest type of seriousness. 
It means more exercise of Christian common sense 
upon the part of young people, especially in choos- 
ing their companions and partners. It means much 
of Christian forbearance and forgiveness in making 
the inevitable adjustments after marriage is entered 
upon. It means the daily application of the gospel 
to daily living under the severest test conditions 
oftentimes, and always with regard to the highest 
type of Christian conduct. Home-building requires 
the very best material to be had in the way of indi- 
vidual Christian character. And it is worth all the 
cost of it, for he who builds and maintains a 
really Christian home has established a kind of 
heavenly experimental station on earth, a little king- 
dom of God which is the best analogy we know of 



The Gospel and Home-Making 139 

for that universal and everlasting kingdom which is 
to be. 

Quiz 

I. What is one of the commonest causes of di- 
vorce to-day? 2. Is there any justification for the 
light and humorous fashion in which most of us 
refer to love and marriage? 3. What is cynicism? 
4. What are the principal reasons which favor mar- 
riage as the normal state of men and women? 5. 
What apt comparison is used to illustrate a good 
marriage? 6. What is fairly involved in a man's 
making himself worthy to be a husband? 7. In a 
woman's making herself worthy to be a wife? 8. 
What relation is there between the building of the 
Christian home and the social welfare ? 

Topics for Further Study 

1. The growth of the divorce evil, here and in 
foreign lands, causes and cure. 2. The influence of 
the popular novel in stimulating or correcting false 
views of love and marriage. 3. The value of the 
church as a meeting ground for the sexes. 4. Does 
the broadening of woman's sphere work toward 
more intimate and helpful companionship in the 
home, or away from it? 5. Some notable instances 
of Christian marriage. 



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